Sorenson Media, a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ for Video Encoding, Sets Course for Web-Based Service

A major upgrade to a well-established software product doesn’t usually move the needle much at Xconomy, where we prefer to focus on the really disruptive innovations and strategic innovations taking place throughout the tech sector.

But this is a time of intensifying frothiness in the world of online video technology. So the improvements that Carlsbad, CA-based Sorenson Media is announcing today in its video encoding technology may be more significant in what it says about the course the company is taking into an approaching storm of competing video technology standards.

“This is a strategic battle that we’re in the middle of,” Sorenson COO Eric Quanstrom told me in a recent interview.

Actually, Quanstrom sees a variety of strategic battles. He looks at Intel’s Sandy Bridge initiative and NVIDIA’s graphics processor technology innovations as a hardware battle that pits the supremacy of Intel’s general-purpose central processor against the capabilities of NVIDIA’s graphics processor chipsets.

Eric Quanstrom

Other battles are forming around competing video codec standards, especially H.264 and WebM. Apple, which supports the H.264 video standard (with its licensing requirements), refuses to support Adobe Flash. Google, which started its WebM video compression project as an open-source alternative, said earlier this month that it plans to discontinue its Chrome browser’s built-in support of the H.264 codec in favor of “completely open” codec technologies—like WebM.

Can’t we all just get along?

“We’re watching the landscape change and

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.