SaaS Based Transcoding Company mPOINT Relaunches As Panvidea
This morning, SaaS based transcoding provider mPOINT announced a re-launch and re-branding of the company which is now called Panvidea. Originally founded in late 2007, the company has been pretty quiet in the space and hasn't done much talking about their solution or given out many details on the company. With today's re-launch, the company now plans to start marketing their services and has also announced some new clients including A&E Television Networks, Fox Broadcasting Company, and Getty Images.
In a conversation with the company yesterday, they said they have about 15 customers and continue to sign up new ones each month. While their website does not list their pricing like most of the other SaaS based transcoding services do, the company says their pricing is much more affordable as they only charge customers for the content that's encoded and don't charge anything for the ingestion and upload of content to their system. By contrast, most other providers charge content owners based on the size of the file that is upload and the size of the file that results from the encoding.
To date, the company has raised "several million dollars" via seed funding and a Series A round and is expected to announce shortly a new round of funding that will give them enough money to operate and grow the business over the next twelve months. The company has about 25 employees, mostly in the U.S. but also with a development team based in Argentina. Panvidea has teamed up with other vendors in the video ecosystem who resell or white label their service including EdgeCast, IBM, Aspera, Brightcove, Akamai, Highwinds and others who to date, have provided most of the revenue for the company. Moving forward the company expects that direct sales will account for 50% of their revenue with the rest still coming from their channel.
The market for SaaS based transcoding services continues to heat up and while there area bunch of vendors in the industry including Panvidea, HD Cloud, Ankoder, Hey!Watch and uEncode amongst others, except for Encoding.com, most of them are still in beta, just launching or have not reached any real scale as of yet. But the market is still early and we'll have to keep an eye on how these companies grow over the next 12-18 months.
Updated March 18th: Panvidea has announced their series A funding in the amount of $2M.