Case Study: Udemy scales video encoding 215x and reduces errors to under 0.1% with Brightcove's Zencoder

Balancing The Course Load: Udemy Grows Video Offering With The Zencoder Encoding Service From Brightcove

Udemy is an online learning marketplace where instructors publish courses that combine video, audio and other media; launched in 2010, it grew rapidly to thousands of courses and more than 500,000 students. As instructor-contributed video volume surged (over 5,000 hours per month), Udemy’s in‑house encoding system struggled with reliability and scale, consuming significant engineering time and producing frequent corruptions and delays.

Udemy moved to Brightcove’s Zencoder cloud transcoding (with Amazon S3 storage), gaining a scalable, fast and reliable encoding pipeline that removed server burden and freed developers for core platform work. The switch cut encoding errors from 10% to under 0.1%, increased encoding output 215x, reduced corrupt video reports, sped turnaround so instructors could publish faster, and helped boost video engagement and course completion rates.

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