Harmonic this week said that Adobe has selected its Rhozet transcoding technology as the core technology in its new Flash Media Encoding Server. The long established Adobe business model is to give away readers or viewers for free and sell and license the tools needed to create content for those readers and viewers.
Adobe supplies tools to the market, but it’s not a monopoly and it allows other rival suppliers paid license access to the API’s to create rival tools. So its PDF creation technology is far more expensive than anything else on the market, and there are cheaper licensed versions out there.
So when Adobe sells a license for an encoder, presumably built into its Flex development engine for Flash, it will be delivering the Rhozet software embedded in it. This may be good news for Rhozet, which is a transcoding engine which can churn out and store multiple video formats such as Microsoft WMV, Microsoft SilverLight, DiVX, Apple Quicktime, MPEG 4, and Adobe Flash Video in VP6 or in H.264, on multiple transport streams, in multiple resolutions. This is just as much because video may be captured in one format, edited in another, served live in a third, delivered on-demand via the Web and mobile in half a dozen more and then finally archived in yet another, than because only one set of tools are available on any given PC.
More or less all professional content begins with a clean MPEG2 stream so the approach is to transcode and store this into as many formats as possible and on the back of doing a good job of that Rhozet won accounts at Amazon, ESPN, MTV Networks, Yahoo and Comcast and then got acquired by Harmonic, which showed it off exactly a year ago in the run up to IBC..
Harmonic paid just $15.5 million in cash and stock and ran the applications on the Entone VoD servers that it also acquired a year before.
For the existing major broadcasters and real time pay TV businesses, real time encoders are their lifeblood, whether that is cable, DTH or IPTV. But increasingly offline encoding is being invaded by off the shelf servers, cheap as chips, which often deliver slower than real-time, software based encoding, on Dell, HP and IBM servers. And even every advertiser needs to be able to drop transcoded video content into existing streams of Flash and other video.
Adobe is known for paying one time flat fees for the things that it gives away, but for the software components that it sells for reasonable fees, it may offer a percentage of revenues, in which case Harmonic may do well out of this, a fact that we could only be sure of by tracking Harmonic’s future financial filings and seeing if the Rhozet revenues rise significantly (if it breaks them out).
The new Flash Media Encoding Server is said to be able to take advantage of multiple CPU cores in a single machine and multiple machines in a network. The Rhozet technology, when used by Adobe, will be used only to accelerate encoding of F4V files using the new H.264 video codec and FLV files using the older VP6 codec.