The RipCode V4 appliance is the first to offer true on-demand video transcoding, which dynamically delivers video to any size screen, enabling video viewing ubiquity in real time.

So what does that mean? Today, user generated video sites, broadcasters and syndicators have to pre-transcode and store multiple file formats of their entire video libraries - which makes sense when you know that popular video, with mass appeal - like the latest episodes of Lost will be viewed by a large audience. But what about the video that two friends recorded in their basement - unless that becomes one of the rare big hits, the likelihood that it'll be viewed by a mass audience is very small. So does it make good business sense to spend time and resources to pre-transcode all of this video on the chance that customers will request it? The RipCode V4 appliance enables video to be transcoded and served to a customer on-demand, as they request it, eliminating the need for operators to pre-transcode and store multiple copies of every video.

It's helpful to think about the impact of on-demand transcoding in terms of the Long Tail - a phrase coined by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine. Take a look at this chart. Only a small percentage of all videos on the Web are really popular and reach a wide audience. With RipCode, sites have the flexibility to pre-transcode the most popular videos that they know will be viewed over and over again. However, for the rest of their video library - which constitutes the majority of their content, RipCode enables video to be transcoded on-demand, as consumers request it and cached within the V4 transcode appliance. This allows broadcasters, syndicators, operators and user generated video Web sites to grow their business and add new revenue through cross marketing of video content, while giving their customers immediate access to an unlimited library of content choices.

This really is a revolutionary new way to address the explosion of video content.