Getting video from the web to your phone

RipCode, a video transcoding solution receives $12.5 million in funding

From news to entertainment, someway or another we are all watching video on our smart phones.  

RipCode, an on demand video transcoding provider announced they received $12.5 million in their third round of funding today.  Granite Ventures led the round followed by existing investors Hunt Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, and ATA Ventures.

RipCode offers a single piece of hardware, powered by Texas Instrument DSP technology, which eliminates the need for racks of servers to deliver and transcode video content to cellular phones.  RipCode’s hardware has the capability to transcode videos on demand as well as in real-time.  

How this relates to delivering video content on our cell phones: In the past, websites would have to convert videos on their sites to an optimized format for delivering to our mobile devices, thus the need for extra space to store these millions and millions of video files so we could access them on our phones.  RipCode elimates this problem.

In December of 2008, RipCode partnered with MySpace Mobile to deliver video content to cell phones using RipCode’s technology.  I was a little disappointed to find out MySpace video wouldn’t work on my iPhone.  Confused I quickly learned the iPhone does not support video streaming.  The iPhone uses, what seems to be an outdated, progressive download video technology.  Why would MySpace partner with a company not compatible with its widely popular MySpace Mobile iPhone App?  This article explains,  

“…device manufacturers like RIM which have historically only supported progressive download, are now rolling out new BlackBerry devices supporting streaming video including the BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95, and Samsung Instinct. By launching with support for mobile streaming, MySpace is reaching a wide community of subscribers.”

Information like the above makes me cringe at the thought of my switching to AT&T for an iPhone when I could have waited a few months more for an Android phone through my last service provider.

Moving on, RipCode’s partners include Adobe, who now owns Flash technology (encoding used in a wide number of video players on the web), Microsoft Silverlight, Cisco, Flo Forum, Texas Instruments (who engineers the DSP technology in RipCode’s hardware), and On2.  

With partners and clients like the above listed it’s no wonder RipCode received its third round of funding.

While RipCode has developed the hardware to get the immense amount of web video content delivered to our cell phones, not including the iPhone, some other companies that may end up making use of RipCode's technology include:

Qik, delivers the reverse of RipCode, allowing a user to stream live video from their cell phone to the web with just a piece of software.  

MediaFLO, offers live television on our cell phones by converting the MPEG2 signals into FLO packets accessible by our phones that are connected to 3G networks.  

Joost, once only a website, now delivers its content, which originates mainly from television to iPhones via progressive download technology.

Truveo aggregates several video content providers in a single app for iPhones and offers a mobile site where users can access content on their cell phones via streaming.  

RipCode is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and has offices in Austin, the Bay Area and London.