Well well well, 2 weeks after Azure announces their transcoder, look what happens :)
There's no way that Amazon heard Azure's announcement and shipped this within two weeks from scratch.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
41–50 of 153 posts
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market. Remember, they're playing for the long-run. Maybe they needed it to convert their videos on LoveFilm.com or maybe another future service connected with their Cloud Drive. What is also means is that if your company provides a service to other developers you might well be in competition with…
>>>Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market Yes. But I don't recall reading anywhere that Amazon would or even could offer this. It makes me wonder what else there is they will sell. Warehousing software? Shipping logistics? Anyone have a list?
Everything that counts are infrastructure. If you're providing a service that other developers build on you're going to compete with Amazon in the future.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#43Why haven't they started pushing these jobs down to distributed clients? I'd love to run an Amazon Transcoding app on my PC and earn credit that I can spend toward other Amazon services.
1, privacy - they would have to send you a copy of someone's video for that. 2, I expect the end user bandwidth is worth more than the CPU time you'd provide, so the credits they could give wouldn't be worth it to you.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#44Amazon should complement this new transcoding service and their existing media streaming (via Cloudfront) with a full media server, along the lines of Red5 or Wowza or Adobe Media Server, that would allow you to do more advanced stuff, such as capturing video from users, hosting video chatrooms etc.
You can already run Wowza instances on EC2 but the premium on top of standard AWS prices is too high, if this functionality can be commoditized there will be an explosion of innovative new uses.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#45The Porn industry just took a huge step forward. :)
Amazon doesn't allow porn content on its servers ..
I just checked their AUP, and it doesn't seem to say that [1]. This makes sense since AWS is pretty much a content agnostic system that you pay for by the hour and otherwise have no interaction with amazon staff.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the fact that you can do encoding across a lot of different regions seems to me to indicate that there isn't any special capabilities required for Amazon to implement this other than just a custom AMI. If I had to guess, this is all part of a strategy to figure out ways to utilize their idle fleet. Spot instances are often used for these sorts of batch offline compute-intensive jobs, but if you're a third…
I'm not sure how it's anti-competitive, unless in six months Amazon tries to shut down Zencoder's or some other competitor's Amazon account, which I can't really see happening.
It's more implicit due to the underlying economics than explicitly so. As long as Zencoder runs on AWS, barring some magic encoding technology, it can never be cheaper than Amazon could theoretically go. This assumes that transcoding services are competitive primarily along price (which may be an incorrect assumption - I'm not in the business). The bottom limit of the price Amazon can charge is a function of their dominant (but admittedly not monopolistic) position in the cloud computing market.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how it's anti-competitive, unless in six months Amazon tries to shut down Zencoder's or some other competitor's Amazon account, which I can't really see happening.
It's more implicit due to the underlying economics than explicitly so. As long as Zencoder runs on AWS, barring some magic encoding technology, it can never be cheaper than Amazon could theoretically go. This assumes that transcoding services are competitive primarily along price (which may be an incorrect assumption - I'm not in the business). The bottom limit of the price Amazon can charge is a function of their do…
That's not anticompetitive though, it's purely competitive. Amazon has better underlying economics (because it has deployed capital to build infrastructure) and therefore is able to offer the same service at a lower price.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#48Wow, that product page is just massive. It tires me so much just looking at it that I'd rather just browse along. I'd like to see what designers looking to build up their portfolio could do with the Amazon AWS products.
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#49It's quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market. Take Zencoder for example (which is one of my favourite players in this field)... if you are to compare the prices with say Zencoder [1] AWS is much more cost effective (by several factors). Even if you were operating at scale and spending $2000 per month with Zencoder, you would only get 50,000minutes worth of HD Video. (You pay 2 minutes worth of…
Looking at the fact that you can do encoding across a lot of different regions seems to me to indicate that there isn't any special capabilities required for Amazon to implement this other than just a custom AMI. If I had to guess, this is all part of a strategy to figure out ways to utilize their idle fleet. Spot instances are often used for these sorts of batch offline compute-intensive jobs, but if you're a third…
Zencoder __had__ to realize Amazon getting into this space was a possibility/inevitability though, right?
Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
#50Why haven't they started pushing these jobs down to distributed clients? I'd love to run an Amazon Transcoding app on my PC and earn credit that I can spend toward other Amazon services.
1, privacy - they would have to send you a copy of someone's video for that. 2, I expect the end user bandwidth is worth more than the CPU time you'd provide, so the credits they could give wouldn't be worth it to you.
Well, there are ways around #1. It seems they could split a video up into enough chunks to make the bandwidth minimal for each party involved (it may not be worth it for /them/, however).