Twistage is a video platform company that focuses on video publishing workflow. The company has built a solution that can handle the entire workflow or serve as the brains / air traffic controller that works seamlessly with and manages other pieces of the puzzle.

For example, if a customer has invested heavily in a player skin, they can continue to use their preferred player. If the customer has a preferred CDN, such as Limelight or Akamai, they can continue to work with the CDN of choice.

As Dru Johnson said, “We follow a model of abstraction layers: while we offer Twistage standard products, publishers are also able to choose any video player, choose any encoding system, choose any CMS, and we’ll automate, streamline and glue together these disparate elements. That is what a true platform is… a foundation with the tools to build and customize your own infrastructure.”

Dru elaborates by saying, “Video workflow, much like any other workflow, is more than just the disparate pieces needed for online video. It transcends the basic components of delivery, monetization, player-skinning, analytics, etc. etc. Workflow is that crucial piece that makes this process a unified whole. It’s the glue that automates the process and makes a single solution out of the five or six or twenty that companies are currently using to deliver their online video. Workflow focuses on the flow of online video, a streamlined process that reduces the manual labor and removes the headache of managing the video process.”

I got a hold of a bleary eyed Dave Wadler, CEO of Twistage, who was nice enough to respond to me from NAPTE.

I asked Dave to list some examples of pieces of the video workflow that a customer can get from somewhere else and have it work with the Twistage platform:

If you want to look at this as a list of line items, we can just go down a list:

  • content ingestion (skinnable iframe, Twistage console, push API, pull API, desktop app, iphone app, webcam capture, etc.)
  • transcoding (use our encoding or pre-encode the content; we’re mid-way through integrations with HDCloud and encoding.com)
  • storage (ours, your own storage system, S3, S3 Europe)
  • player (skins of course, but you can actually upload a complete player swf into Twistage and we’ll use that; so more than the skin — the player itself)
  • player plugins (ours, your own, and 3rd-party plugins)
  • analytics (ours and Google; additional integrations forthcoming)
  • advertising (many options ranging from networks like Tremor, network aggregators like adap.tv, a generic VAST implementation, our own solution, and full-blown ad platforms like DART and Liverail, among others)
  • CDN (we have integrations with 12 at the moment, I believe)

Beyond this, we can also discuss where machines are deployed. For example, you can use our code to power ingest and transcoding servers, but run them our of your own datacenter. You can similarly use shared resources — or dedicated resources — in the cloud. Finally, we haven’t even touched on how the API can be used to customize the experience fully.

I’m probably forgetting something as I’m in Vegas and it’s 2:40 AM for me….