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ThePlatform adds free hosted ingest services

June 9, 2009 — 8:57am ET | By Pete Wylie

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ThePlatform, the Comcast-owned online video management company, announced it will begin offering cloud-based ingest services to its clients for free through its media publishing system. The new ingest offering is another addition to thePlatform's push to lower the total cost of operating a broadband business; it began reselling CDN services and storage capacity in February.

ThePlatform spokesman Marty Roberts said the ingest service is targeted at customers who either have rapidly updating content, such as news organizations, or very large content libraries that need to be digitized in many different formats, such as video portals.

"Traditionally, ingesting large amounts of video has created bottlenecks for these customers as they try to get their content online as fast as possible," Roberts said. "Ingesting content had become a cost center for our customers, and we wanted to help them solve the problem, because helping to create solid online video businesses is in both our and our customers' best interest."

Roberts said the ingest facility would come with a built-in service level agreement complete with reporting and logging of errors. The ingest service also will be automated, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual processes that slowed things down, according to Roberts.

As thePlatform is a Comcast subsidiary, there has been much speculation and even slight confirmation that the online video company will play a major role in the cable TV industry's push to bring content online behind a pay wall. Robert declined to comment on whether the hosted ingest function was part of the workflow thePlatform had to design in order to digitize large amounts of cable network content for the new service, but it's certainly worth noting how crucial this capacity would be to a possible offering.

For more:
- see the press release here