Is it possible that a country like Australia, with such poor Internet speeds (thanks Sol) can produce a video web service startup that’s ready to take on the world?

I recently caught up with Rex Chung from RoRCraft, a team of 3 Ruby on Rails developers based out of Sydney, and he seems to think they can do it.

Rex and his team have developed a video conversion web service called Ankoder. By using Ankoder’s API and code libraries, developers will be able to easily integrate user generated video functionality into their website. Not only is the development and integration pain taken away but site admins will still be able to maintain control over the whole process. Ankoder is built on top of Amazon’s S3 and EC2 Web Services so scalability and robustness shouldn’t be an issue.

The use case the Ankoder demo site highlights is a scalable mini YouTube site. However, with commercial use rates to be “very cheap”, according to Rex, I think it’s more likely they’ll succeed through volume, i.e. lots of sites (both small and large) using their service, than through someone attempting to dethrone the king of video.

As a proof of concept you can use the Ankoder online file converter. It’s an easy way to convert and download youtube files to a wide range of formats that you can watch outside of the browser or on other devices.

In a little trial, it took 5 mins to convert and download my favourite 8 minute Anderson “The Spider” Silva highlight reel from YouTube to 3gp for my mobile. Impressive stuff for a web service.

I can’t comment on the API and code libraries as yet (I’ll have to have a further play around with the service), but there are a couple of small issues I can see with the video conversion demo, the biggest of which are the potential copyright issues around downloading videos off YouTube. YouTube’s Terms specifically state, “you will not copy or distribute any part of the Website in any medium without YouTube’s prior written authorization”- but then again, when did YouTube ever really care about Copyright or Terms of Service/Use?

There are a few players in this space – Rex highlights Twistage, Fliqz and Hey!Watch - but I still fail to see any reason why Ankoder can’t succeed.

There’s still a bit to go, but the guys have the skills and the experience to make it work. Hopefully we’ll have more good news to report in the near future.