Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Elastic Transcoder

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 153 posts

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#61

Post by ProblemFactory »

mikecane wrote: post #36
zimbatm wrote: post #14

Earlier 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?

Amazon already offers warehousing and shipping as a service, even if you don't sell your products on Amazon: https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/180-311...

You ship them a pallet of stuff, and then use a web API to ask items to be delivered to addresses.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#62

Post by nmcfarl »

cwh wrote: post #33
neotek wrote: post #27

How about audio transcoding? At my music startup we're building a transcoding backend that will take in FLAC, AIFF, or WAV and spit out MP3, FLAC, AAC, ALAC, and OGG files for people to download, and I'd kill for a transcoding service with a robust API that can deliver those formts.

build it

No need to build it - Zencoder already does it.

--

Edit: looks like they only support these audio codecs: aac, ac3, amr, eac3, mp3, vorbis, and wma

https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/format-and-codecs...

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#63

Post by yoda_sl »

It will not be surprising that in fact Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in fact what Netflix with Amazon's help may have work on in the past few years. Netflix is well known to use Amazon web services not only for the streaming part but even for doing all the movies encoding for all different devices they need to support. So I will not be surprise that it has now become a mature project that Amazon is now opening up, similar to the other service for S3 where you can ship your hard drive to upload directly on S3 without wasting bandwidth: from what I recall that service was in fact created initially for Netflix but later on open to third party.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#64

Post by zitterbewegung »

chrisacky wrote: post #7

It'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…

Does this mean we will see Zencoder and all of the other competitors in the cloud transcoding space start to lower their prices to match amazon?

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#66

Post by wmf »

klinquist wrote: post #40

Why 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.

You might be insulted when you saw how little they could afford to pay you. The idle time on random PCs is worth less than the overhead cost of managing it.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#67

Post by brianbreslin »

Idea: build a pretty web based UI or software downloadable UI for this and mark up the costs to be just under zencoder's pricing. Would that be viable? for people who need 1 off transcoding they load up $20 of credits minimum or something.

If someone wants to do it, I have a domain I've been sitting on which would be good for this.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#68

Post by bjustin »

jpdoctor wrote: post #57
chrisacky wrote: post #7

It'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…

> There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. Yep, they put a potential competitor into their critical path. The business lesson is: Don't do that. Nothin personal, jus business.

A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#69

Post by jbigelow76 »

newhouseb wrote: post #46
stanleydrew wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

    >As long as Zencoder runs on AWS, barring some magic encoding technology, it can never be cheaper than Amazon could theoretically go.
Nobody is forcing Zencoder to stay on AWS, if it no longer makes business sense to stay there then they need to move. If Zencoder believes that isn't feasible they need to find different value adds to make themselves more attractive than Amazon. This isn't anti-competitive at all.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#70

Post by untog »

bjustin wrote: post #68
jpdoctor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. Yep, they put a potential competitor into their critical path. The business lesson is: Don't do that. Nothin personal, jus business.

A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?

If you'd asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have expected Amazon to provide a CDN. Or a DNS server. Or a giant MySQL instance in the sky.

I think the general lesson here is that if it is a server-based operation that can be made more cost effective in bulk, Amazon are interested in doing it.

Post reply on HN