Sorenson Media (http://www.sorensonmedia.com) has announced Vid.vu, an URL shortening service designed specifically for professional online video.

The web-based URL abbreviating service works with Sorenson Squeeze Server, the company’s scalable, cloud-based, enterprise-grade encoding solution to be formally released in November. Vid.vu demos were part of Sorenson Media’s presentations at last week’s Streaming Media Europe conference in London .

“There are many URL shorteners available out there, but none that are created specifically for professional, enterprise video needs,” says Eric Quanstrom, Sorenson Media’s COO. “Vid.vu not only provides automatically shorter URLs to video permalink pages -- which are typically excessively long -- it also has built-in protection against malware, phishing scams and spam. Vid.vu also enables Sorenson Squeeze Server users to create and track their own custom shortened video URLs, a feature that is exclusive to our customers.”

Vid.vu takes a URL link that could typically run two lines and slashes it down to fewer than 14 characters (including the vid.vu prefix). As part of the Squeeze Server platform, Vid.vu integrates seamlessly with a user’s workflow through intuitive APIs (application programming interfaces) As customers encode videos, they can choose to have an automatically generated shortened URL and can customize it by including intuitive keywords of their choosing.

Customizable Vid.vu URLs are also useful within a professional video workflow to track videos created, says Quanstrom. Because Squeeze Server is designed to encode high volumes of videos, having an organized, short link strategy benefits any company. Vid.vu enables users to track video analytics, including number of click-throughs to a given video or library of videos over any period of time. Vid.vu aggregates and displays this data, including geographic location of click-throughs, in an web interface, allowing users to track where and when a video is being viewed regardless of where it is hosted.

Shortened Vid.vu links also aid search engine discovery and make URLs easily understandable when they are shared, rather than relying on a randomly generated set of letters and numbers, Quanstrom says. For instance, a company called XYZ Company could create video links such as vid.vu/media1 to simplify management of the corresponding video internally as it is shared with internal or external audiences.

URL shortening through Vid.vu is available exclusively to subscribers of the soon-to-be-released Sorenson Squeeze Server. For more info about Vid.vu, go to http://vid.vu .