Sorenson Media has filled a gap in its video encoding product line with a new product that occupies the middle space from both a price and performance perspective.
Aptly called the Sorenson Squeeze Premium, the product is aimed at small-medium-office customers with multiple video concurrent encoding and editing projects. It builds on the characteristics and features of the Sorenson Squeeze desktop video encoding product (top price of $999) but adds in the capabilities of the high-end, multi-featured server-based system that runs about $5,000.
"We really wanted to differentiate Squeeze Premium from Squeeze Desktop, [which is] a workflow tool that fits into anything," said Coby Rich, director of marketing for Sorenson Media, during an interview with FierceOnlineVideo. "Squeeze Premium takes that a step further in providing a centralized encoding station where editors can offload jobs."
The unit, which lists for $1,995, is built for an existing customer base that increasingly needs to offload encoding responsibilities, Rich said.
"They don't want to tie up their workstations for the tedious process of encoding to multiple formats. They need a centralized hub to offload their video encoding jobs to," he said. "It's the middle piece between our desktop line of products and our server line of products because our users wanted the ability to have a familiar interface they could run on a server without any restrictions."
The initial product, which was introduced at IBC 2012 in Amsterdam, will only run on Windows even though the desktop product runs on both Windows and Mac platforms.
"This is a server product and the Mac doesn't have a server environment," Rich explained. "Most customers have asked for this and they can still run Squeeze Desktop on a Mac and jobs to a Windows environment, but Squeeze Premium is just built for Windows."
It's also built for those who want to get right down to the editing and encoding jobs or, as Rich put it, "someone who doesn't want to fuss with the engineering of setting a really high-end robust server."
Squeeze Premium, he emphasized, may not be a high-end robust server, but it is a premium product that goes beyond Squeeze Desktop. As such, it comes with benefits that include presets for all major formats and codecs already supported by Squeeze, including adaptive bitrate standards; priority technical support; a year of free product upgrades; and a free copy of Video Compression for Flash, Apple devices and HTML5 by Jan Ozer, an encoding expert.
"One thing we've done with Squeeze Premium that we haven't done with our desktop products in the past is give it a priority service and maintenance plan with a dedicated phone number and priority queue for the first year of the products and any upgrades that happen in the first year," Rich concluded.
For more:
- see this news release
Related articles:
Sorenson debuts faster, more efficient Squeeze 8.5
With Squeeze 8, Sorenson looks to simplify video encoding