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Telestream Acquires Cloud Encoding Specialist PandaStream and Launches Telestream Cloud

Together creating the industry’s broadest and most advanced encoding solutions.

Nevada City, Calif., November 2nd, 2015 –Telestream®, the leading provider of video transcoding and workflow automation solutions, today announced the acquisition of Cloud-based encoding provider, PandaStream. The result of a comprehensive investigation of key suppliers in the cloud-based encoding market, the acquisition accelerates Telestream’s strategy for providing cloud services to complement its on-premise solutions.

 

As a direct result of this acquisition, Telestream is also announcing the launch of Telestream Cloud, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that builds on Telestream’s significant position and long history in transcoding. This new platform makes the PandaStream encoding capabilities available under the Telestream brand today and will serve as the foundation for future offerings in the cloud.

 

PandaStream services and technology have been developed by an impressive team of experts with significant experience in building scalable cloud infrastructure. PandaStream’s encoding at scale, ease of use and cost efficiency combined with Telestream’s broad set of encoding products means Telestream customers have access to the most advanced encoding portfolio available.

 
“After careful investigation of the market and consideration of various companies, we identified PandaStream as a very good fit for our needs. This acquisition fast tracks the development of our existing cloud strategy, enabling the immediate launch of Telestream Cloud. By acquiring PandaStream, we are achieving a quantum progression in our cloud development objectives for both our enterprise and desktop product families,” stated Dan Castles, Chief Executive Officer of Telestream.

 
Using the PandaStream architecture, Telestream Cloud offers a globally distributed, VOD encoding platform that dynamically scales in response to customer requirements. File transfer and encoding times are optimized from any location since Telestream Cloud leverages multiple cloud service providers including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

 
“Telestream can now provide video transcoding anywhere and everywhere – on your desktop, in your facility’s server room or in the cloud,” said Shawn Carnahan, Chief Technology Officer at Telestream. “In the longer term, this acquisition opens up new opportunities for Telestream customers across every market we serve.”

 
Existing PandaStream customers can expect the same products and services they have enjoyed under the Panda brand. Using the new cloud infrastructure, Telestream will be rolling out additional services over time. The PandaStream team will transition to a separate business unit within Telestream over the next couple of weeks. More information is available at www.telestream.net.

 

Trademarked company and product names are the property of their respective companies.

 

About Telestream

Telestream provides world-class live and on-demand digital video tools and workflow solutions that allow consumers and businesses to transform video on the desktop and across the enterprise. Many of the world’s most demanding media and entertainment companies as well as a growing number of users in a broad range of business environments, rely on Telestream products to streamline operations, reach broader audiences and generate more revenue from their media. Telestream products span the entire digital media lifecycle, including video capture and ingest; live and on-demand encoding and transcoding; captioning; playback and inspection, delivery, and live streaming; as well as automation and orchestration of the entire workflow. Telestream corporate headquarters are located in Nevada City, California. The company is privately held. For more information, visit www.telestream.net.

 

For more information, please contact:

Telestream
 North America EMEA & APAC 
Veronique Froment or Doug Hansel Bob Charlton
veronique@highrezpr.com bob@scribe-pr.com
Doug@highrezpr.com +44 20 7084 6335
+1 603-537-9248

Introducing resumable uploads

Ever since we first launched Panda we’ve provided a jQuery plugin allowing developers to easily implement file upload functionality to their site or app.

However, file upload through http isn’t particularly reliable: if your connection is slow or experiences even small disconnections during an upload you’d need to re-start the upload from the beginning.

This can be very frustrating, especially when trying to upload videos that can be as big as 20GB!

We have solved this problem by introducing a new upload API which provides resumable capabilities. As soon as your internet connection comes back online, your uploads will automatically resume from the point at which they were interrupted.

(more…)

Socketmaster: Zero Downtime Restart for Your Apps

Hi developers!

I have just released yet another Open-Source project. This was gracefully sponsored by PandaStream, so I thought I might as well post here. Let me introduce you to socketmaster.

In the tradition of UNIX, socketmaster does just one thing but does it well; it helps your app to restart without losing or refusing a single connection. socketmaster is the gatekeeper, keeping your sockets warm under the fire of restarts (christmas starts sooner every year isn’t it ? ho ho ho!).

To port your app to socketmaster you just need to do two things:

  1. Change the startup code to open the file-descriptor 3 as a socket listener.
  2. Gracefully shutdown on SIGHUP.

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Customer Spotlight: Artplayer

ArtPlayer.tv

At Panda, we have some truly great customers and are always interested to see how they’re integrating Panda with their apps and sites.

Artplayer is a unique online video platform aiming to showcase the best video content from the UK arts industry. In addition to a desktop and mobile web presence, Artplayer offers mobile apps, exclusive editorial content, access to major UK Arts organisations and a range of video services including production and training.

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Efficient Realtime Dashboard with Pusher WebHooks

Today we want to talk about a code update we have made on Panda, taking advantage of the Pusher web hooksreleased a few days ago.

This is a fantastic feature for us as it has considerably reduced the number of api calls made to Pusher, saving us bandwidth and money.

One of the great features of Panda is it’s real time dashboard. Panda can display the new encoding jobs, their progress, and your stats instantly with no effort. Thanks to Pusher, implementing this was really easy.

At such a scale the right design for your software is to separate your app into smaller apps, small apis and workers. In our case, the encoding dashboard is completely separated from the api but they share the same Pusher app. When an event occurs on Panda (like a job progress), the api triggers a Pusher Event and the web app reflect that change immediately.

(more…)

Introducing stacks for advanced profiles

Friday we realeased a feature that we called Stacks. A stack is an encoding environment including a set of encoding tools and commands. This feature will provide us a way to upgrade ffmpeg without breaking your encoding commands.

The current stack, called 'corepack-1' is still the one used by default. The new stack we are introducing is called 'corepack-2' and brings speed plus lots of new formats and codecs.

If you are using some advanced profiles, you should consider:

  • using a Preset. They are easier to maintain and we provided lots of encoding options directly using either the web dashboard or the api.
    You can find the full documentation on our website
  • upgrading to the new stack. Your current encoding command might be incompatible with the new stack but it should be fairly easy to update it.
    You can find the full documentation on our website

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New features: custom output paths & iOS update

Today we have deployed some very interesting improvements on our platform. Let’s review them all.

Custom output filename paths (store your files in subdirectories!)

Many of you have requested a way to store video inside folders instead of having everything in the root of your bucket. We think we found a nice solution to solve this problem.

When you upload a video there is now a new optional attribute called path_format. It enables you to specify destination and name of a video and it’s encodings.

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Status update

It’s time we break the silence !

Since the last post, your host has arrived on the team. I am excited to bring my experience in Video, Linux, and Web development that I gained during the last years at STVS, another amazing company. But for now, let me tell you of the latest updates on the PandaStream platform.

Web interface speedup

After our ruby 1.9 migration, the average page response got divided by two, down to around 350ms. Missing, is the /cloud page that still takes around 1 second to load so that is something we are going to work on next.

Web+Heroku ♥

For the Heroku customers ; you can now access to a specialized version of our interface by logging into Heroku and choosing the Panda Stream Add-on. This can be handy if you want to follow visually the progress of your encoding and get real-time notifications. You can also access it by typing the following command in your console. Enjoy !

$ heroku addons:open pandastream --app your_app_name

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