Sorenson Media released Vid.vu this week, a URL shortening service designed specifically for professional online video.

The web-based URL shortening service works with Sorenson's Squeeze Server, a cloud-based, enterprise-grade encoding solution that will be formally released in November. Much like other services, Vid.vu takes a URL link that could typically run two lines and slashes it down. The similarities end there. As part of the Squeeze Server platform, Vid.vu integrates seamlessly with a user’s workflow through intuitive APIs. 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.

“There are many URL shorteners available out there, but none that are created specifically for professional, enterprise video needs,” said 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.”

Customizable Vid.vu URLs are also useful within a professional video workflow to track videos created - which could be immensely useful when encoding high volumes of videos. Vid.vu also provides users with analytics, including the 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 a Web interface, allowing users to track where and when a video is being viewed regardless of where it is hosted.