SEPTEMBER 28TH, 2010
By DRU JOHNSTON
Earlier this weekend Twistage was featured in the International Business Times in their article “Online Video Platforms Fight For Growing Share”. For an industry that was basically non-existent five years ago it’s nice to see OVPs grow and gain more traction in the market… more signs that we’re heading in the right direction. For those who don’t have the time to read the whole article I’ve included an excerpt below. Thanks much to Gabriel Perna and the staff at International Business Times!
One such company is Twistage, a high-end video and rich media platform, which caters to an enterprise crowd. Unlike many in the industry, Twistage allows its clients a certain deal of flexibility. Whereas most OVPs require customers to use their own players, Twistage offers its own product and the ability to use a third-party or homebrewed player.
“We view all of our components of a rich media ecosystem like legos. We can snap those legos any way you want,” David Wadler, CEO of Twistage, said. Along with flexible video players, the company also allows content creators to install their own ad server and networks or use Twistage’s prebuilt one.
This kind of flexibility has helped Twistage get ahead in the industry. The company is constantly ranked as one of the best OVPs by VidCompare.com. It has also attracted customers such as Jive Software, which uses Twistage’s video platform for its own software.
“We don’t really play by the rules,” Wadler says. “We’re dorks who write good code and are selling on our own behalf. We look at the fundamental elements of online video and we’re the glue that holds those elements together.”
SEPTEMBER 27TH, 2010
By DRU JOHNSTON
Hello all!
We at Twistage are thrilled to announce that we’ve been nominated over at the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards for two categories: “Best Online Video Company – Technology” and “Online Video Platform – Premium.”
As a company of geeks with such a huge focus on developing innovative and new technology, we’re clearly not a major marketing machine. That’s why we’re so thrilled by this nomination. It’s a little recognition from the community that we’ve helped develop and foster. And it’s a good sign that we’re doing something right. Thank you!
So to all our readers and friends, please take the time to go and vote for Twistage. And a special thanks to all over at Streaming Media.
Now back to coding. 
SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2010
By DAVID WADLER
Fortunately for you readers, I abandoned all sense of shame years ago. (The number of phone calls and emails I receive regarding the video interview I did that was capped off with the “Hammer Dance” continues to astound.) Today, someone sent me a link to a pretty hilarious screenshot: http://www.adsgonebad.com/?p=34. I don’t know what sort of traffic this URL has received thus far, but were it to go viral, I suspect that I might single-handedly destroy Bikini Zone’s business. There is probably some fodder for a more meaningful post on the difficulty of contextual advertising in video, but I think I’ll let the link stand on its own. You tell me, is the picture worth more or less than 1,000 words?
SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2010
By DAVID WADLER
When we started Twistage, presenting the vision was incredibly challenging. Although we were bullish on the market and had developed software that we could demonstrate, we often ran up against VCs who couldn’t be swayed. When you’ve quit your job, eliminated your income, and committed yourself to building an online video company, it’s more than a little frustrating to have a VC look you dead in the eye and say “Online video is dead.”
While we were ultimately successful in securing investments in Twistage, it’s a little known fact that we actually signed our first customers before we closed our first round. And though we reassured ourselves that these companies who decided to cast their respective lots with us had vision, the principal element that they shared was faith. Faith that this little start-up was still large enough to meet their needs. Faith that this company that hadn’t yet closed a round of funding had the financial wherewithal to keep the lights on. Faith that the founding team would figure it out and accomplish what it set out to do.
Several years hence, two of our first three customers are still using Twistage for their online video needs. (The third one went belly up less than a year after signing on.) One of the two surviving initial customers took an equity position in Twistage. Our pitch became more compelling. Customer five was confident that customers one through four were happy with our platform. Customer twenty no longer felt like signing on was a risky proposition. Customer fifty engaged with us as if it were old hat.
I suppose the challenges for a large company entering a new line of business are similar. Several years ago, Oren Michels (of Mashery fame), turned us on to Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) beta program. The product scope was pretty limited at the time – on-demand computing resources and low-cost cloud storage. When we started, there wasn’t even any sort of uptime guarantee. Still, the possibilities were intriguing and we dove in. (Early Twistage customers, fear not! We maintained and continue to maintain always-on infrastructure with our excellent hosting provider, Voxel.net.)
Whatever minor hiccups we encountered in those early beta days were trumped by the “wow” factor we added to our product: Instant scale. Need to migrate and transcode 30,000 pieces of video content in a few hours? Spin up a bunch of EC2 instances. Concerned about cost? Spin them down when done. Computing power was now fungible for us, enabling us to make fundamental architecture changes that gave our then young company the scale of a business many times our size. Our faith in the smarts of the people who built the Internet’s largest retailer to execute on building a utility computing platform was certainly repaid.
Now, AWS adds customers in droves. Not just start-ups either. And I suspect that prospective users read about Amazon success stories like Twistage and are reassured, just as our customers could feel good that they were about to travel what had become a well-worn path. In working with Amazon to put together the Twistage AWS case study, I had to think back to what AWS used to look like and how it evolved. In so doing, I had the great pleasure to think about how far we’ve come as a business.
AUGUST 5TH, 2010
By DRU JOHNSTON
This morning we at the Twistage offices were greeted with a very warm and wonderful blog post from our friends and clients over at CatchTheFire.tv.
We are very honored by the feedback and the writeup, and since it’s always nicer to hear positive things about a company from someone outside the offices, I figured it couldn’t hurt to share some of our favorite bits.
On our APIs:
Twistage’s tagline is “Video Workflow: Solved” and it’s absolutely accurate. All of the tools they offer via their console can be addressed programatically via APIs, which are well documented and always include code samples. You can really build as tight an integration as you could possibly want.
On the ease of integration and reliable service:
CatchTheFire.TV is really in a sweet spot now. Twistage’s service is rock solid reliable, and their product is everything we need and more. The integration we’ve built is very nice, and came together in roughly 4 months with only a single developer working not quite full time. In terms of features and bugs, Twistage rolls out a new release every 2 weeks. Initially this had me a little nervous that they would introduce a lot of reversions, but that’s not been the case at all. What we end up with is access to new features and functionality ALL the time, and when we find bugs they’re typically fixed with the next release.
On our support:
And their support is fanatical. A lot of people claim to have fanatical support, but Twistage takes the cake, for me. They take ownership of things, they go the extra mile, and they’re highly communicative the whole time.
This feedback is always excellent to hear, but more importantly it is amazing to hear these things in regards to our support and reliability, elements of a company that we view as crucial and necessary for any quality business relationship. And as a self-labeled “API Company” it’s terrific to hear that our APIs have continued to ease the headache of video workflow for our clients. Support, reliability and flexibility. It’s hard to do better than that.
And as a personal note, I want to point out my favorite quote from the blog post:
Having read over this… it sounds like a pitch written by Twistage’s own marketing department… lol. The reality is that they’re fantastic.
Well as a member of the Twistage marketing department let me assure you that this post did not come from me… I’m not that good a writer .
Read the full blog post here.
