Viddler is in the high quality Video as a Service business for a customer who wants to pay a fixed cost, be done with it, and just have it work. Similar to Blip and Ooyala, more focussed on business than YouTube. They serve thousands of business customers, including high traffic websites like FailBlog, Engadget, and Gawker.

Viddler is a good case to learn from because they are a small company trying to provide a challenging service in a crowded field. We are catching them just as they transitioning from a startup that began in one direction, as a YouTube competitor, and pivoted into a slightly larger company focussed on paying business customers.

Transition is the key word for Viddler: transitioning from a free YouTube clone to a high quality paid service. Transitioning from a few colo sites that didn't work well to a new higher quality datacenter. Transitioning from an architecture that was typical of a startup to one that features redundancy, high availability, and automation. Transitioning from a lot of experiments to figuring out how they want to do things and making that happen. Transition to an architecture where features were spread out amongst geographically distributed teams using different technology stacks to having clear defined roles.

In other words, Viddler is like most every other maturing startup out there and that's fun to watch. Todd Troxell, Systems Architect at Viddler, was kind enough to give us an interview and share the details on Viddler's architecture. It's an interesting mix of different technologies, groups, and processes, but it somehow seems to all work. It works because behind all the moving parts is the single idea: making the customer happy and giving them what they want, no matter what. That's not always pretty, but it does get results.

Site: Viddler.com

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