Intridea Launches Summer 2008 Release of MediaPlug

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intridea, Inc., the agile enterprise Web 2.0 company, today announced the Summer 2008 release of the MediaPlug on-demand service, which enables IT professionals to transcode and store complex media files using Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the newest version, MediaPlug has been transformed from a Web service utilizing the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to a fully self-contained Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) media appliance server, capable of handling very high volumes of rich media. An enterprise can own its instance of the MediaPlug media appliance server for roughly $150 per month, providing a highly affordable solution for bringing YouTube-like experiences to the website.

MediaPlug Summer 2008 was announced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, which is being held May 29-June 1, 2008 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.

The MediaPlug EC2 media server appliance is a pre-installed software service on EC2 virtual servers that allows users to upload and transcode complex multimedia files to standards, such as Flash, JPG, or MP3, and store them on the Amazon S3. No understanding of transcoding is needed, since MediaPlug handles it automatically. By using MediaPlug servers to transcode and store complex media files, enterprises can bring as many Web 2.0 media experiences to their websites as they want, without burdening the servers running the website.

Integrating MediaPlug services into an enterprise’s applications takes only minutes once a customer has purchased the self-contained MediaPlug Amazon Machine Image (AMI). The Summer 2008 release now offers the ability to integrate the service with applications running on any language, operating system, and hardware platform—without modifying or writing a line of code. A MediaPlug Web service provides direct integration into backend code while the provided JavaScript library enables direct integration on HTML pages.

“Commercial and non-profit enterprises, alike, continually need to weigh the benefits of using rich media to create more powerful user experiences on their websites versus the costs of compute power to deliver them,” said Dave Naffis, Intridea founding partner and director of product development. “With the easy integration and affordable paid AMI model of MediaPlug, there’s no longer a need to compromise.”

Yong Zhi, Intridea product manager of MediaPlug, added, “By eliminating the need to learn transcoding, MediaPlug significantly extends the community of enterprise developers who can incorporate rich media into their Web applications.”

The newest version of MediaPlug is being launched at RailsConf today along with two other Intridea services. The new Scalr on-demand service is a self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon EC2. Act As Community is a new social network custom-tailored to encourage communication and collaboration among users of the Ruby programming language.

Pricing and Availability

The Summer 2008 release of MediaPlug is available now. The on-demand service fee is double the cost of a small Amazon E2 server instance—or approximately $150 per month. The fee includes automatic updates and improvements, and there are no long-term contracts. Customers can start or stop as many MediaPlug instances as needed, and pay as they go, without being charged large license fees for each instance.

About Intridea

Intridea, Inc. develops high-performance Web 2.0 applications and services to help enterprises realize the power of cloud computing and social networking. Intridea solutions are based on the Ruby on Rails Web application framework for agile development. Intridea actively contributes to Rails directly and through open source plug-ins, and hosts Acts As Community, the social network created to encourage communication and collaboration among users of the Ruby programming language. Intridea is headquartered in Washington, DC. For more information, visit www.intridea.com.