Telestream joins major industry leaders to offer video transcoding support for WebM

NEVADA CITY, USA: Telestream, a leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, today announced broad support for the WebM project along with Google and other industry leaders.

The new WebM open web media format, based on the VP8 open source video codec, will be available at no additional charge in all Telestream video encoding, transcoding and workflow products, including FlipFactory, Episode and recently announced Vantage.

“A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies are open and freely implementable. Video is fundamental to the web experience, and developers and content publishers need an open video format option,” said Mike Jazayeri, Group Product Manager at Google. “We are excited Telestream is joining a broad coalition of industry leaders supporting the WebM project to bring a new era of open innovation in web video.”

WebM is a flexible format that provides high-quality video across resolutions and bitrates to support a variety of viewing devices. Computational efficiency enables smooth video playback on low-power devices such as netbooks and mobile phones.

WebM is optimized for the web and network video delivery, providing fast video starting and seeking within videos. VP8 is based on 10+ years of innovation in video compression by On2 Technologies. Its predecessors have been installed over two billion times, making it proven technology. Google gained access to the VP8 video codec when it acquired On2 Technologies earlier this year.

“Telestream has extensive experience optimizing and deploying On2 technologies and is uniquely positioned to bring the new WebM format to the video consumer, enterprise, media and entertainment markets,” said Barbara DeHart, VP of Marketing at Telestream. “We are excited to join Mozilla, Opera, Google, YouTube, and other software and hardware manufacturers in the WebM project.”

Telestream provides the broadest and deepest video and audio transcoding format support on the market today for desktop to server, Mac and Windows systems. Telestream video compression products support more than 120 digital media formats and wrappers, including WMV9, H.264, VC-1, Flash 8, VP6, MPEG-2, and 3GPP.

In addition, Telestream video transcoding and workflow products support direct integration with leading third-party systems, allowing users to create and distribute content to virtually any platform or viewing device.

The WebM format, including the VP8 codec, is included free with all Telestream video transcoding and workflow products. WebM is available immediately in Telestream FlipFactory 7.0 software. It will be available in Telestream’s new Vantage and Episode 6 software products when they are released later this quarter.