Case Study: Bitmovin achieves real-time, ultra-fast video transcoding (turning hours into minutes) with Google Cloud Platform

Bitmovin turns hours into minutes by transcoding video fast using Google Compute Engine

Bitmovin, a video‑streaming company founded in 2013, built the bitcodin service to deliver smooth, low‑latency HD, 4K and beyond streaming. The company faced a common industry challenge: traditional transcoding is CPU‑, memory‑ and storage‑intensive and often much slower than real time, forcing broadcasters to wait hours to publish news or live events rather than minutes or seconds.

Bitmovin runs bitcodin on Google Compute Engine, spooling up parallel VMs for minutes at a time to transcode content (from browser uploads, APIs or Google Cloud Storage) into multiple formats including MPEG‑DASH, storing results in Cloud Storage and delivering via CDN. The solution enables playback during encoding, scales to thousands of instances with sub‑2‑minute provisioning, and achieves up to 66× real‑time for HD (5–6× for 4K), turning hours of work into minutes and making live, real‑time streaming limited only by upload speed.

Bitmovin

Christopher Müller

Co-Founder and CTO