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| September 17, 2007 | Austin American Statesman |
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| RipCode Unveils Box That Speeds Up Web Video Conversion |
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| Portfolio Company: RipCode |
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By Kirk Ladendorf
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
The flood of video clips moving over the Internet has been a bonanza for Web sites like YouTube.com. But it's also generated a computing bottleneck at many Web-connected data centers.
Video clips generate heavy Internet traffic, but they can slow servers to a crawl as they chug through the math-intensive process — called "transcoding" — of shifting video content from one format to another. That's a common practice because there are dozens of different formats for playing videos on computers, cell phones, personal media players and other devices.
For entrepreneur Brendon Mills, the video bottleneck means that money can be made by speeding up the process.
His company, RipCode Inc., unveils its solution to the problem today — a powerful but compact box that takes up a small slot in a computer data center but does the video processing work of 10 to 20 servers.
"The market requires a new approach to video transcoding," Mills said. "RipCode is the most viable solution, and successful trials with numerous customers have confirmed that."
One of those trials was completed at MySpaceTV, a video-intensive arm of the social networking Web site. Mills said his company is in active discussions to sell its boxes to several major Web sites that are most active in delivering video content over the Internet.
Mills founded his company in late 2005 in Austin but moved the headquarters to Richardson because of family reasons. Austin remains the company's major engineering center in this country with 24 workers. RipCode also employs 45 engineers and software developers in India.
RipCode says the video transcoding problem is growing dramatically, pointing to a study by IDC, a market research firm, that projects that some 1,200 trillion bytes of video data are downloaded or streamed over the Internet every day, nearly double the level of a year ago. In four years, that video traffic level is expected to quadruple again.
Most servers use software to decode and encode video into various digital formats. RipCode's V4 box uses a series of signal processing chips to speed up the process. The boxes aren't cheap — the list price is $58,000 each — but they are considerably less expensive than server-only solutions, Mills said.
The company has raised $17.5 million in venture investment, including a $10.5 million round announced in August.
"We strongly believe that transcoding is the key to unlocking a new chapter in the evolution of online video content and delivery," said Hatch Graham, managing director for ATA Ventures, which participated in the investment round. "The growth of this market and the strength of the RipCode solution gave us the confidence to recommit beyond our original investment."
The new funding round, Mills said, will enable the company to beef up its sales operations to go after the thousands of companies that send video content across the Internet to televisions, cell phones and other devices.
The rapid expansion of mobile services that transmit videos to cell phones and other portable devices will keep building demand for better ways to process video.
Mills, 39, was involved in NetSpeed Inc., an Austin maker of data communications equipment that was sold to Cisco Systems in 1998. He then founded General Bandwidth Inc., a telecommunications equipment maker, that got bogged down in the prolonged communications industry slump.
After leaving that company, he decided his next company would be different.
He decided that the Internet video market would be fast-moving and more fun.
"I wanted to focus on something that was youthful, exciting and had almost limitless possibilities," he said. |
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