A transcoder gives you renditions. It does not give you inventory.
Nothing inside a general-purpose encoder knows what an ad break is, what an SSAI slot is or what a campaign is. The file comes back correct and still unsellable — someone has to carry it to a second system before it earns anything.
Forge is already inside that second system. The breaks, the overlays and the insertion sit on the same platform the file was encoded on.
What happens to your file
Six stages, each one visible while it runs. No black box between upload and download.
Forge shows you which renditions a file will produce before the encode starts — so nobody pays for a rendition that was never going to help.
This is the actual product
Not a mockup — two frames from a real job running in the Forge workspace.
The renditions
Seven are possible. Your file gets the ones that make sense for it, and no others.
It never upscales
A 720p master is never blown up to 1080p just to pad the ladder. Upscaling costs money and adds nothing a viewer can see.
Portrait and landscape
Renditions are chosen from the short edge, so a vertical reel and a 16:9 OTT episode both come out correctly framed — no letterbox or pillarbox bars baked in.
What you get back
A streamable package
A master playlist plus one playlist per rendition, aligned so a player switching quality mid-view does not stutter.
A plain MP4
Any rendition, rewrapped as one file you can email, edit or upload. Rewrapped — not re-encoded — so the pixels match what the player streams.
A manifest
A machine-readable description of everything produced, so the systems downstream never have to parse a playlist to learn what happened.
Billed for minutes, not seats
The industry-standard billable-minute model, with the arithmetic shown to you rather than hidden inside an invoice.
100 minutes of output at HD is 200 billable minutes. No per-seat licence, no per-codec option to buy, and self-hosting on your own hardware is on the table.
Rates are quoted per channel — ask us for yours.
Where Forge is today
Running, and honest about the rest.
One platform, end to end
Transcoding is the first step of the same job, not a separate vendor.
Have a library that needs conditioning?
Send one file. We will run it through Forge and send the package back, so you can judge the output rather than the pitch.