Designing for Change

It’s an exciting time to be working in video.

Today online video is everywhere. We stream video to our televisions, browsers, and mobile devices. Commercials, shows, and even feature films are shot, edited, distributed, and viewed through an entirely digital workflow.

The tools for producing high-definition video (and beyond) are a fraction of the cost they were just a few years ago. Producing quality video is more accessible every day. Every year, new technology augments or even revolutionizes aspects of our industry.

Unfortunately for video producers, the requirements for delivering video are more complicated than ever. Making sure the right video is in the right place, seen by the right people at the right time requires an understanding of digital video codecs, metadata requirements, and device limitations for a multitude of video destinations.

This process requires attention and time, ultimately distracting from the primary focus of telling a compelling story through video. The complexity is compounded simply because the technology never stops changing.

Our Philosophy:

The uStudio engineering team focuses on abstracting away this complexity throughout our platform. From the end-user experience down to our internal software architecture, we recognize the technology used to solve video problems today will be different tomorrow, and the requirements of any given destination can (and will) change any day of the week. We invest heavily in a layered system, ensuring that we can add new video platforms with minimal cost while easily extending existing platforms.

In the user interface this is accomplished by throwing away concepts like transcoding and packaging. A user of our platform shouldn’t be concerned whether one destination needs an XML manifest or another needs MPEG2 video delivered in a transport stream. Publishing to dozens of platforms should be as simple as publishing to one — by dragging a video onto a destination.

This convention is followed throughout our technology stack. Our API exposes simple resources that can be combined through normal HTTP methods. Transcoding, publishing, and other operations are routed through a task management system to the appropriate work nodes, and only at that point are jobs prepared for individual utilities. Even our internal configuration uses a custom taxonomy for managing authentication, feeds, transcoding profiles, and other facets of video delivery across our supported destinations.

We invest in these areas because we are motivated by the future of video. We believe that designing a system around a single endpoint (like an embeddable player or third-party distribution channel) is short-sighted and ultimately pessimistic. Great content — and the people that create it — should be enabled by the possibilities of technology, not limited by them. We are taking on that challenge.

It’s an exciting time to be working in video.