Our Origin

Why We Built the First Cloud Native Media Analysis Microservice

Over the past decade, the media industry has made massive strides toward microservice based architectures especially in encoding, packaging, and delivery. Teams within Netflix pioneered this shift, decoupling media processing workflows into modular, scalable services that could be independently deployed, optimized, and maintained.

But one part of the pipeline remained stuck: media analysis.

Tools like ffprobe and mediaInfo are still deeply embedded in local scripts, monolithic apps, and containerized workflows. They’re essential—but brittle, slow to scale, and hard to manage at cloud scale. Analysis, paradoxically, became the bottleneck in an otherwise elastic, cloud native media processing stack.

We built probe.dev to fix that.

Founded by the creator of Encoding.com the industry’s first cloud native media processing platform, Probe.dev is the natural evolution of our work. We saw firsthand how critical clean, normalized, and fast media analysis is for everything from QC and ingest to AI pipelines and encoding decisions.

Media analysis should be a microservice, just like everything else!

With Probe.dev, you can drop in a single API call and get structured, normalized, ML enhanced metadata from ffprobe and mediaInfo, without maintaining infrastructure or writing fragile glue code. It’s built to integrate the way modern engineering teams work scalable, fast, and developer first.

Our architecture borrows directly from the playbook of the most forward thinking media companies. If you’re trying to follow in their footsteps, we built this to make that path easier.