56.Com Switches To On2 Video

On2 Technologies have announced that 56.com, China's leading video sharing web site, is to standardise on On2 Flix Engine as its server-side transcoding and publishing platform for all web video uploads.
In a move to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs and increase video quality, 56.com will switch to On2 VP6-based Flash video to encode and publish an average of 50,000 new video streams each day. 56.com serves video to over 35 million people each month.
56.com reviewed many encoding solutions as well as other formats for Flash video. On2 Flix Engine proved the most robust and reliable through rigorous testing and provided the broad input format support needed.
The decision to choose On2 VP6 as the codec for Flash video was based on many factors including encode speed, compression metrics, features, playback performance, market acceptance and licensing terms.
Yan Ti, Technology Officer at 56.com, said: "We recognised that On2 VP6 and H.264 main profile are comparable in video quality, when we compared to H.264 baseline profile to On2 VP6, VP6 was consistently better, in some cases needing almost 40% less data.
"This is significant as we reach out to China's mobile users as there is no support for main profile H.264 in mobile phones currently. To provide the best possible quality for the web and mobile in H.264 would mean maintaining two encode files. With On2 VP6 we only need one."
Yan To continued: "Futhermore, On2 VP6 also provides skip-free playback on less powerful PCs, which means we can reach a much wider audience with high quality content. It is also faster to encode, so we will need fewer servers to maintain the same volume of content."
John Fargis, VP of Asia Sales at On2 Technologies, said: "We are pleased that 56.com has chosen On2 VP6 video for Flash and feel this is yet more evidence of a market trend in China towards adoption of On2 Video.
"With our technology, we are able to provide 56.com customers the superior quality they deserve and expect, while also saving 56.com up to 40% on their bandwidth costs."
Further information is available at: www.on2.com.
(KMcA)