According to our VP of Engineering, Cliff Hall, you have to be kind of stupid to start a company. Not stupid in the head. You have to have limited knowledge of what you’re going to do. What Cliff means by this is, if you know too much you’ll find all the reasons not to do it. It’s akin to diving off the high-dive at the pool and not looking down first. If you look down, you’ll probably freeze at the end of the diving board. I thought about this as I read an article this week in the New York Times called Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again by Brad Stone and Matt Richtel.
The article likens the recent rise in VC funding for Internet companies with little or no revenue to the dot-com boom several years ago. I am not an expert in start-up macro economics; although I do play one as CEO of RipCode, but I think the bubble comparison is a bit crazy. The market dynamics for the majority of Web 2.0 start-ups being funded today is very different than it was in the late nineties.
What I do know for sure is that starting a company is hard work – bubble or no bubble – anyone that has ever done it will agree with me. So you have to be a little crazy or be a little naive to get into the start-up game. I discussed with Chris Phipps in a recent interview with the DallasBlog, that most entrepreneurs only have a finite amount of start-ups in them because it takes so much energy and mental fortitude to make it successful. And though it may seem that Internet start-ups are being showered with VC dollars, I know firsthand how hard it is to raise money. Funding a company takes a lot of time and effort. And it doesn’t stop once you secure the money. The money is only a means to the end – you haven’t succeeded just because you were able to get funding.
Chris asked me in the interview to rank Product, People or Market as the most important for starting a new company. Easy, market first. You have to be on the right wave when there is an opportunity for your technology. It’s easy to point to reports and market metrics that tell us the Internet and mobile video market is exploding. Enabling technologies like transcoding will certainly benefit from this wave as UGV sites, studios and syndicators look for ways to grow their business and add new revenue through cross marketing of video content.
When you can hit the trifecta like I think we have with RipCode – the right market, smart people and a great product – that really makes this is a fun time to be an entrepreneur.
Today we’re bringing you the last video blog in a 3 Part interview series with IDC analyst, Greg Ireland. Greg co-authored the whitepaper Transcoding Internet and Mobile Video: Solutions for the Long Tail. If you missed the first two interviews, I encourage you to take some time to view those. Greg has some great insight into the Internet and mobile video markets that is well worth hearing. In today’s video blog, we talk about a variety of topics including how transcoding can better serve consumers and where it fits within online and mobile advertising. We also discuss broadband’s impact on Internet video and consumer’s viewing habits. And finally, we touch on the future outlook for video codecs including the movement toward H.264.
We hope you found this interview series insightful. For more information on this topic, you can download the complete IDC whitepaper from the RipCode website. We plan future video blog conversations with other industry thought leaders, so stay tuned.
As a follow up to last week, we’re excited to bring you Part 2 of a 3 Part interview series with IDC analyst, Greg Ireland. Greg co-authored the whitepaper Transcoding Internet and Mobile Video: Solutions for the Long Tail. I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg during his visit to Austin several weeks ago and we talked at length about the direction of the Internet and mobile video markets. In Part 1 of the interview, we discussed market forces driving transcoding, the mobile video impact, and how the Long Tail is being applied to video. In Part 2, we talk about where transcoding fits into the Internet video business model, we look at data around the growth of Internet video, in particular, the rise of short form content and we discuss the drivers pushing additional encodes in an effort to reach the concept of video viewing ubiquity. Look for the final installment of my 3-Part interview with Greg Ireland next week. For more information on this topic, you can download the complete IDC whitepaper from the RipCode website.
For those who may not know, today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day. Bloggers around the web are uniting to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger, including me, is posting about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. For RipCode, that’s video transcoding. I’ve talked in a previous post about how RipCode has introduced a powerful, yet energy efficient single RU appliance which can replace between 10 – 20 general purpose transcode servers. And at only 165 watts, can translate into significant energy savings, especially for large data centers.
Other technologies like blade servers and virtualization are giving data center managers choices for reducing their overall hardware and energy use. But in the video transcoding space, legacy general purpose servers still dominate the data centers for user generated video sites, studios and syndicators. Internet and mobile video is growing at a tremendous rate – IDC predicts that by 2011 over 7,800 terabytes of video per day will be downloaded from websites. At RipCode we’re working to transform the way in which most companies think about transcoding and educate the market on a more efficient way to process video content. But we also understand that not everyone can or will transition to appliance-based transcoding technology…at least not right away. However there are things that data center managers can do to measure and improve the efficiency of both new and existing data centers. The GreenGrid, a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers, offers a few good whitepapers for guiding data center managers on these topics.
In an interesting article by Alex Goldman of ISP-Planet, he quotes Russell Kurtz a principal at CS Technology who gave the keynote address on a conference focused on next generation data center challenges and solutions. Kurtz said, “Politicians and regulators are starting to notice that data centers consume a significant amount of energy. It’s 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. electric load (and growing). The problems remain that if a data center is built for 10 MW or 20 MW, remember that an electric substation does about 40 MW. Your data center could use half the local load.” This underscores what we’ve heard from customers who have space to grow in their data center, but can’t get more power to their building. Adding more general purpose servers just is not an efficient means to keep up with the amount of video that needs to be transcoded.
This is not an insignificant problem. So on Blog Action Day, my hope is educate a few more people about the benefits of green transcoding technology like RipCode and reduce the energy footprint required to process the growing volume of online and mobile video.
We’re excited to bring you Part 1 of a 3 Part interview series with IDC analyst, Greg Ireland. Greg co-authored the whitepaper Transcoding Internet and Mobile Video: Solutions for the Long Tail. I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg during his visit to Austin and we talked at length about the direction of the Internet and mobile video markets. In Part 1 of the interview, we discuss market forces driving transcoding, the mobile video impact, and how the Long Tail is being applied to video. Look for Parts 2 and 3 of my interview with Greg Ireland next week. For more information on this topic, you can download the complete IDC whitepaper from the RipCode website.
This is a nod to Robert Reinhardt over at Flash Support for two cool Flash resources (1) table of Optimal Frame Dimensions for Flash Video (2) Flash Video Bitrate Calculator. Those of you who have dealt with the hassles of figuring out bitrates, aspect ratios, sampling rate, and so forth in order to tame the video delivery process will certainly appreciate these reference tools.
This post and future tips, tricks and resources I find on the Web or glimpse from the RipCode team will be tagged “Best Practice”. My goal is for this to be an online resource that houses some of the best thinking and resources available.
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