Encoding No Longer Enough for Sorenson

Fourteen-year-old Sorenson Media is widely known among video gurus for Spark, its popular high-quality online video codec. But now, led by a couple of new execs, it’s trying to own a bigger part of the video experience by introducing a full-service video publishing platform called Sorenson 360.

Obviously, the company is a bit late to the game, but with its long-standing customer relationships, it’s not coming empty-handed. New CEO Peter Csathy, who recently sold video chat startup SightSpeed to Logitech, said his initial goal is to sell 360 as an upgrade to the company’s existing video publishers — though maybe not all of them, considering they include bigwigs like Hulu. Sorenson’s new VP of product management, David Dudas — who came from another company that transformed itself into a white-label video service (that would be Eyespot, which later shut down and sold off its assets) — is leading the 360 charge. Execs recently moved the long-time Salt Lake City-based company’s headquarters to San Diego.

Beyond its reputation for high-quality video, Sorenson’s client-side encoding approach (meaning videos are compressed before you send them off, either through an application or a browser applet) may give customers a significant cost reduction because it helps the company avoid charging upload fees for pushing big video files onto the network. Sorenson also offers a relatively simple price sheet, starting at $99 for 2,500 video streams and 10 GB of storage per month with no setup fees. But yes, it faces a lot of competition.