Founded in 2007 by Jonathan Dahl, and built by Slantwise Design and Sevenwire, Zencoder is a distributed multimedia processing system for websites that allow users to upload video. Zencoder was built with Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...

 and provides a REST

Rest

Rest may refer to:* Leisure* Human relaxation* SleepRest may also refer to:* Rest , a pause in a piece of music* Rest , the relation between two observers* Rest , a 2008 album by Gregor Samsa...

 API for creating new transcoding jobs. It utilizes the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a central part of Amazon.com's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services . EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications...

 to provide a scalable transcoding system.

Zencoder for its cloud-based service that lets users get their videos ready for presentation and delivery via web or mobile apps. Investors in this round include Andreessen-Horowitz, Ignition Partners, SV Angels, Lowercase Capital, Founder’s Collective, 500 Startups, and individual investors such as Matt Cutts, James Lindenbaum, Orion Henry, Adam Wiggins, Wolfgang Buehler, Mike Bollinger and Neil McClements.

Flix Cloud project

In 2008, Zencoder partnered with On2 Technologies

On2 Technologies

On2 Technologies , formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly-traded company , headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designs video codec technology. They created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion...

 to create Flix Cloud, an online video encoding service. Flix Cloud combined On2's Flix Engine encoding software with Zencoder's web application

Web application

A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...

. Flix Cloud officially launched in April, 2009 after a brief beta testing period where it provided free transcoding for all customers.