Beyond Social

Upload, Convert, Conquer: The Hidden Genius Behind Seamless Social, Vista Social

• Vista Social • Episode 32

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Ever tried uploading a video to a platform only to hit an error wall? Frustrating, right?

In this behind-the-scenes (and then some) episode of Beyond Social, hosts Reggie Azevedo and Vitaly Veksler peel back the layers of what it takes to make social media management tools like Vista Social work their magic — without asking users to jump through hoops. From decoding file formats to turning complex video conversions into a seamless user experience, they reveal the nuts and bolts of creating tools that truly serve.

But it’s not just tech talk. They explore the philosophy of customer-first design: why Vista Social refuses to let its users bear the burden of the platform’s challenges and how prioritization in problem-solving keeps innovation alive. Whether you’re wondering how videos get optimized for every platform or why some tools leave users hanging, this episode is an eye-opener.

Tune in for an honest, witty, and unapologetically nerdy dive into how the best tools stay ahead, and why a little extra effort behind the screens makes all the difference in front of them!


I think we really take the stance that everything, and I think we've said this before, everything really means everything for us. You know, why... Why stop short of delivering value to a customer in a specific area? Hey everybody, welcome back to Beyond Social Podcast, the show where we go behind the scenes on how marketers are doing awesome things on social and how we're building tools to support them. And today Vitaly and I are going to go behind the scenes, but behind the scenes, behind the scenes, really. I, I have some tech questions that I've been meaning to ask you. Uh, we've been doing some really cool things with Vista Social, like we'll get questions from customers. And like, I know the answer to the question and you know, train the team on it but there, there's kind of a behind the scenes, behind the scenes, which is how, like how, right? So I think almost every marketer out there has at one point or another tried to, let's say, upload an MOV file or a JPEG to a social network that doesn't support that specific file format. And I know that we, we think differently, right? We're not just gonna, hey, you upload this specific video to Vista Social and we're just gonna tell you, oh, not supported. Sorry, try something different. What do we, can you explain that a little bit? So, um, when you're using a native app, Say TikTok or Instagram and you can upload pretty much a lot of different formats into the native app and the native app has quite a bit of video conversion ability, video changes and, and it goes through quite a bit of processing. So by the time it actually comes out of the native app onto the network, it's been already properly processed by Instagram. So when you upload a video to a social media management platform like Vista, like some other platforms, So, obviously, you're uploading a raw file, whether it's an MOV or an MP4, you know, whatever the format, but it's quite far, in a lot of cases, from what networks are willing to accept because there is no longer a native app to convert it, right? So now it's up to the tools to handle the video properly. And it's a no small task, right? Lots of different formats, the videos, and I think majority of the tools take the position that, "Listen, it's your, as a user, responsibility that you have to upload the right tool." To us in principle, to me in principle, like as a head of product, I find that to be a repulsive to kind of, put the burden of using the product onto the user like the product has to do things for the user. So the user is using the product to get content onto the network. It's the tool's responsibility and converting video is challenging. Uh, the different formats, uh, different, uh, aspect ratio, basically the widths and heights, right? Are all different. You get all by pixel in terms of, uh, aspect ratio. Video doesn't get published. You get into just, you know, bit rate or something not being right in your video. You don't get like, recently we've seen the HDR format out of iPhones. Like, that's like not even supported by most platforms, like, natively. So, essentially, it is our goal, uh, but we've been, we are super fortunate these days. I mean, we live in a world of cloud computing. And, um, and I'm old enough to appreciate how impossible this would have been as a task 20 years ago. Being able to produce, you know, we, we process, you know, tens of thousands of videos every day, right, for our customers. And to be able to produce, do it outside of cloud, outside of AWS, uh, Amazon cloud. It would have been a challenge. So, luckily for us, uh, there is a cloud, uh, which offers us pretty much infinite processing power. Just think about it, right? So, essentially, you have not just a computer, but you have endless number of computers. Around every continent. It's, it's, it's absolutely mind boggling, and I think a lot of people, like, maybe don't, don't quite know what, that Amazon is not just a store, But also this entire system that hosts probably most of the websites in the world. I don't know the exact percentages, but it's gotta be a lot. Oh, more than half. More than half for sure. More, more, more than half. So we are heavily relying on the cloud to do heavy conversions on videos where, when necessary to, to, to make sure that they are good for the network. Yeah. So that's a long answer to your question. So if I, if I get this right, 'cause, you know, we try to explain it as best as we can to sometimes when the customers come in. And so the idea is. I go to upload a video, as an example, to Vista Social, we're going to take that video, and we're going to then create six, seven different versions of this video, each one up to spec, to what that network wants that video to be delivered as. Bitrate, aspect ratio, dimensions, audio bitrate, color, mapping, whatever else is available. Is that about right? I do think that you just revealed a trade secret. But now that you did, yes, that's exactly what we do. That's cut that out. Is that too deep? No, no, that's good. I think, uh, giving out trade secrets is totally fine. Uh, uh, but yeah, that's exactly what we do. The system is smart enough to know. What each network likes, and it caters video formatting for each network. Yeah. Well, I mean, listen, yeah, trade secret, but if at the end of the day, some of our competitors, right, some of the tools out there, who've been around, let's say, 10 years, 8 years, 5 years, who has still not gotten around to saying, "Hey, this is something we want to solve for." A, I don't know, I don't think it's likely they're going to do it, but B, if they do it, it's to the benefit of the community, right? I think, again, there are so many great ideas out there, um, from the competitive edge perspective. Um, even if you did want to emulate a competitor, um, you'll still do it slightly differently. Maybe to your advantage, maybe not. Um, I know for a fact, and I have spoken with engineers, um, in some of our competitive tools in certain events that we've attended, that a lot of them do employ very similar techniques to handling certain things. Uh, it's just the degree of success varies. Right. I think today our percentage of publishing video, and this is how this whole thing is measured, uh, is above 99%. Wow. So more than 99 percent of the formats of videos are getting published. Um, which is remarkable because that creates very smooth experience, um, for our users. Yeah, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna put a pin on that one right there. And I'm going to say something that you may not like. Um, 99% is an amazing number. Absolutely. It's killer. And I think the fact that we don't even ask them to upload it in a specific format, we just do it. We take care of them. Like we say, we're going to take care of them is phenomenal. I want to talk about that maybe half a percent because you know, funding support our team, we hear about it sometimes. Which is that this isn't exactly a perfect science per se, and there are cases, and I know that recently we had situations maybe a couple months ago with HDR, new formats, new ways of shooting 8K on iPhone, and now the raw formats on iPhone 16 Pro Max Ultra, whatever other letter they're going to add to it. It creates situations where there's types of videos that perhaps, um, don't play nice with the way that we, we kind of convert stuff. Um, is it ever going to be perfect? Well, I think first of all, we, we monitor a lot of failures and I think our systems are continually improving, but I think the fact that we have a physics PhD on our team that handles this type of tasks, and a team member whose career goes back to working for Sun Microsystems... um, is to our advantage. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm probably going to have our support team cut some sections of this video and like, you know, sometimes it's just like, hey, listen, this is something real cool that we do. You should check it out. You know, you can put it on like a pop up or something in the application. But I think it goes beyond that, right? Like we obviously video conversions and whatnot, but like, I think we really take the stance that everything, and I think we've said this before, everything really means everything for us, you know, why... Why stop short of delivering value to a customer in a specific area if we know that, you know, um, I don't know, TikTok has a certain amount of characters. You can't really type beyond that. Why, why would we let you go and create a post that we know is going to fail, right? Like we try to give them warnings and all. So talk to me a little bit about the mentality around that. The mentality is sort of, um, and the challenge in building tools like Vista and servicing clients in this space. Is that the, the number of things the customers need and want is absolutely infinite. Um, and it's quite challenging for a tool to, a solution like Vista, to then try to prioritize these things. So I think a lot of tools are hard at work building solutions for the customers. Some are just a little bit more successful than others in terms of trying to prioritize these solutions in a way that are most meaningful to the user. Because, mind you, some of these, um, issues with video processing, uh, a small, you may be talking about half of the percent difference, but it could take you months to find the solution, right? And that's a drag on resources. So I think, um, I think it, tools are well intentioned in, in, in the sense that they want to get better. I think the only tools that I'm not going to speak to in that same regard are much larger tools who have lost any sort of efficiency or sense for what the customers really want a long time ago. They're swimming in money and they could care less about, um, not that they care less, but they, again, I think the better way to describe it is that they lost efficiency, and ability to solve complex challenges quickly, right? And that typically applies to much larger platforms, much older solutions, things like that. For us, it's just a way of sort of thinking. We also try to prioritize. I think given yours and mine background in social media tech, I think we are able to do that a lot more efficiently and effectively. Um, but also the times are changing. Some of these solutions that we're building Given the Amazon cloud, for example, given the infinite processing power, given the AI innovations, given access to pre made solutions, you know, in the world of open source. Our lives are easier. So if you couple substantial experience with technical innovation, right? It begs, all these problems, they beg to be solved. Yeah. Sky's the limit. It's a matter of prioritizing what's important. And, uh, wow, there's a lot going on behind the scenes. This is, we're going to have to create a series here. 16 episode series on going behind the scenes, behind the scenes. But, uh, hopefully not divulging too many more trade secrets here. Sweet. Thanks, Vitaly. I'm sure we'll, we'll do another one soon. Okay. Thank you guys for, for tuning in. Appreciate y'all for being here. Uh, as we say every time, if you're consuming this on YouTube, on Apple podcast, Spotify, make sure that you like this, you share it. If you have a specific topic you want us to cover, maybe you're curious about how certain things work, uh, how we're building things. You want us to go back behind the scenes, behind the scenes again, go to vistasocial.com/podcast. Drop us a note and maybe, who knows, you'll get featured here on an upcoming episode as well. Appreciate you guys. We'll see you on the next one.