Media and entertainment companies across the world are in the midst of a transformational shift to direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming experiences. With audiences sheltering in place in 2020, this shift has been accelerated as audiences have adopted new streaming services more readily in 2020 than ever before. With more content being streamed in higher resolutions and operations becoming more distributed, media companies today require a cost efficient, high speed, and scalable way to process and deliver video content to an ever increasing number of end devices and platforms.

Google Cloud is committed to building industry products and solutions that help media companies simplify operations and distribute their content to the widest possible audience. We’re building a set of video-focused APIs that empower developers to easily build and deploy flexible high quality video experiences.

Today we’re announcing the first of these products, the preview availability of the Transcoder API. The Transcoder API is an easy-to-use API for creating consumer streaming formats, including MPEG-4 (MP4), Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH, also known as MPEG-DASH), and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). 

Many D2C streaming platforms use a multi-codec strategy, and the Transcoder API supports popular codecs, including H.264, VP9, and HEVC. This strategy allows providers to offer a better, high definition experience to more viewers. The API also supports full partitioning for fast encoding of large video files, meaning that entire hours-long movies can be prepared in minutes.

Developers can get started quickly by submitting transcoding jobs through REST API, transcoding files in Google Cloud Storage, and using Google Cloud CDN or third party CDNs to effectively distribute content to audiences across the globe. To learn more about the Transcoder API, please visit the documentation and pricing pages.

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