VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

UK-based New Bamboo is launching Panda, the first open source video platform that’s running solely on Amazon Web Services.

Earlier this week Ruby-experts New Bamboo announced the launch of Panda, which was featured on TechCrunch. Now this is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, this new video platform is open source and therefore free. Looking at the documentation, they implemented a basic REST API, for uploading and integrating content onto existing sites. Second, the software has been developped to run on Amazon Web Services, and in particular S3, EC2 and SimpleDB. Most video services providers I know use Amazon S3 for storing their video content, but this is the first time I hear the actual video encoding process been handled on the EC2 service. That is impressive because it elimates any upfront hardware investments to get going with video on your site.

I anticipate this new service to see some nice traction in the lower tier of the market, for content publishers and maybe e-commerce sites. In effect, Panda covers the market segment between YouTube-video hosting, and Brightcove on the high-end. Time will tell if this new platform will succeed. Like any open source project that wants to succeed, Panda has to consistently deliver feature improvements and bug fixes to be viable. Then monetize somehow these efforts with premium support services for the enterprise.