A friend of mine, Baptiste Coudurier, is the person at Hulu who manages the transcoding of all their videos. He told me they also transcode a video to multiple versions to accommodate different streaming devices and bandwidth characteristics.<p>I think it only makes sense to lazily-transcode videos on demand (and cache them) when you have millions of videos (eg. Youtube). Netflix and Hulu have much smaller catalogs, so they can afford to transcode ahead of time, and it simplifies their processes.
If this is true, then this should immediately put to rest the explanation (that I'll admit I bought into) that only one video format will win out (H.264 vs Ogg Theora/VP8 is the major discussion point) - as video streaming companies would be unwilling to re-encode their content for more than one format.<p>Apparently they are quite comfortable encoding as many as 120 instantiations of their videos.
At the end of the post there's this quote:<p>> <i>Simply put, content owners who can deliver quickly and without error are getting more licensing revenue from Netflix.</i><p>Really? Can Netflix afford to be picky with content owners? It seems their main problem is the limited size of their online catalog...? They should take anything they can get!<p>I just finished watching "Elite Squad 2"; it's such a great movie (really, it is: see <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/</a>) that I wanted to watch the first one, but it's "only available on DVD".<p>Why, why, why?
As technology progresses we can probably assume that at some point in the future virtually all devices in use will have fast enough network connections and decoders to play videos that are the highest quality the human eye can see. At this point it would only be worth encoding in this "highest" quality. Of course, by this time we may have new screen technologies such as holographic displays.