Case Study: Funny or Die achieves scalable, reliable, lower‑cost video transcoding and HTML5 transition with Zencoder

Funny or Die Chooses Brightcove’s Zencoder and Video.js to Scale Video Transcoding and Make Transition to HTML5 Video

Funny or Die, the comedy video site combining user-generated and original content, faced a growing backend challenge: its EC2-based FlixEngine encoding setup created bottlenecks, slow turnarounds, high error rates and operational overhead, and it couldn’t support newer formats like HLS and WebM as the product was discontinued. At the same time the team needed to move from separate Flash and mobile codebases to a single, responsive HTML5 strategy to support rising mobile and cross-device traffic.

Funny or Die adopted Brightcove’s Zencoder cloud encoding service and the open-source Video.js player, which immediately cut encoding time and errors, improved compression and video quality, and reduced costs and engineering time. The stack scaled automatically for traffic spikes, simplified CMS integration and ad monetization, enabled fast re-encoding to add WebM/HLS for HTML5 playback, and let the small engineering team focus on product rather than troubleshooting.

Funny or Die