New Bamboo launches Panda -- a new Open Source platform to simplify the uploading and transcoding of video content on websites

October 6, 2008; 08:02 AM

Monday 6th October 2008, New Bamboo, the specialist in bespoke software development using Ruby on Rails, has launched “Panda”, a new Open Source platform to help web developers, design agencies and large scale enterprises to meet the demands of uploading and managing user generated video on the web in an easy to install manner. The source code is freely available at http://pandastream.com along with installation and configuration guides.

Panda is a video platform which provides a truly robust and flexible video solution for handling high-volume video uploading, conversion (transcoding) and streaming aimed at professional organisations that want an alternative to expensive commercial solutions already on the market.  Panda also allows user generated video content to be uploaded more easily onto websites too.

Damien Tanner, Co-Founder of New Bamboo said: “Video is always a thorny issue for developers. It requires a large amount of space on the server and bandwidth for streaming. The other issue is that uploaded videos must be transcoded into various formats for playback on the web. This process is incredibly resource intensive, and needs a well executed architecture. Traditionally companies have repeatedly reinvented the wheel - spending a lot of time and money on building this difficult architecture in isolation.”

New Bamboo has built Panda to be run on Amazon's cloud computing architecture*, which removes many of the traditional hardware problems faced by video solutions.  Furthermore, improvements to Panda will be shared online in future versions, including feedback from users and contributors.
New Bamboo advises that anyone wanting to allow users to upload video to their site, or handle a large amount of video assets should use Panda. “Individual developers and large scale businesses can feel confident by using a trusted piece of Open Source software.  Our new Open Source platform will save valuable time and money in development costs. Whilst integration with the Panda encoding platform is designed to be as easy as possible using the simple API, we do offer consultation to help develop larger scale architectures and integrate it into a site,” adds Tanner.

New Bamboo has several industry-leading clients in market segments that include business consultancy, global publishing and international not-for-profit organisations.