A product rendering controller (PRC) manages the overall process of creating video-on-demand (VOD) assets or products from source assets that are obtained from a wide variety of different content sources (e.g., web-based sources) and which are in a wide variety of different native media formats. The source assets are converted to video transport streams such as an MPEG transport stream and transcoded as necessary to create the VOD products. The PRC determines the VOD products that need to be generated, pre-caches data that is to be incorporated into VOD products, and selects the pool of video product generators that is to be used to convert the source assets to VOD products.