Panvidea Supports WebM Open Media Project

NEW YORK, Aug. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Panvidea™, a global leader in on-demand video encoding, preparation, processing and distribution for entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform, has today announced broad and comprehensive support for Google's new WebM project, along with Adobe, Microsoft, and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors. The new WebM open web media format, based on the VP8 open source video codec, is immediately available to all users of Panvidea's cloud based video encoding and processing service (www.panvidea.com) at no additional charge as part of the company's already extensive list of the highest quality video and audio codecs and containers.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100826/NY55934LOGO )

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100826/NY55934LOGO )

WebM is an open, royalty-free media file format designed specifically for online video distribution. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec developed by On2 Technologies, a leading video compression firm acquired by Google in 2009.

The VP8 codec delivers high-quality video while efficiently adapting to varying processing and bandwidth conditions across a broad range of devices. It is highly bandwidth efficient and has low storage requirements, making it attractive for publishers looking to reduce costs and expand licensing opportunities for their content. The format strives for simplicity, making it easy to integrate into existing environments and easy to fine tune for the highest possible output quality.

WebM is designed to be a free alternative to the proprietary formats that dominate video on the web today – especially H.264. WebM is 100% free, and open-sourced under a BSD-style license. The introduction of the royalty-free WebM format has already had a significant impact on the online content market. As more companies – including most of the major web browsers – embrace the format, the owners of other formats are increasing starting to embrace open standards as well. One recent example is MPEG LA's recent decision to offer a royalty-free license for the popular H.264 video codec for video sites that offer free video streams to consumers.

"We are very excited to be able to announce our support for the WebM initiative," said Chris Cali, co-founder and CEO of Panvidea. "As online video becomes more pervasive and more professional, developers need to be able to select from a wide variety of high quality formats – both open source and proprietary.  We believe that the WebM project, with its emphasis on openness and will make it even easier for publishers of all shapes and sizes to distribute video content of the highest possible quality. We think that's a good thing for the industry and we are pleased to be able to offer WebM video encoding to our customers."

Panvidea already provides comprehensive support with full codec parameter control for all major TV, VoD, web & mobile formats. Panvidea's built-in intelligence and instantly scalable cloud video encoding engine automatically determines the best way to produce the highest quality results in the fastest possible time.

"Panvidea leads the industry with regard to scalability, cost efficiency, batch processing capabilities, and workflow automation for professional content owners," said Cali. "Adding support for Google's WebM format only adds to the strengths of our service offering."

For more information on the WebM project, please visit the following site: www.webmproject.org/

About Panvidea:

Panvidea is a global leader in the preparation, processing and distribution of professional entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform. Originally founded as mPOINT in November 2007, the company re-branded in Spring 2010 with co-founder Chris Cali as CEO, to become Panvidea. Panvidea provides the only instantly scalable, on-demand solution to encode digital media elements, manage relevant metadata, edit and transform media for multiple audiences, and supply content as digital products to any platform or device. Panvidea's secure software service eliminates the need for professional content companies to incur significant capital expenditures or pay exorbitant hourly fees to prepare their content for internal use or external digital distribution.

For more information visit http://www.panvidea.com/

SOURCE Panvidea