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Amazon Elastic Transcoder

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Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#101

Post by wpietri »

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…

> I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step?

I'm not so sure I'd be worried. Amazon has certain advantages in the market. But they are not into handholding at all. I think you can easily out-compete them on ease of use, support, and community. You can also do much better marketing, and make much more interesting partnerships.

I also think Amazon's massive scale constrains them some; they can't be as flexible. In Zencoder's shoes, I'd be looking to see if I could get a pricing advantage through specialized hardware that covers my base computing load. I've see people drop their AWS bills by a factor of 10 when a good sysadmin designs a workload-specific setup.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#102

Post by jpdoctor »

wpietri wrote: post #99
jpdoctor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and we aren't worried. So are you working on designing them out? Or are you counting on them never giving your AWS account short shrift?

I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust. Trust is the biggest factor in a platform decision, and they'd be foolish to put all their other business at risk for a temporary advantage in one small slice. Especially since they are still making money on every Zencoder job.

> I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift.

Really? One example: When states threatened sales tax (before CA), they cut off retailers in those states.

They can and they have given people short shrift when it's in their business interest. To be fair, that just means they know how to increase sales by selecting who gets thrown to the lions, which is necessary in any business.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#103

Post by wpietri »

dagge wrote: post #48

Wow, 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.

I think the problem may be your lack of interest. As somebody who has used AWS a fair bit, I love those massive pages. It's easy for me to jump around, and being able to use in-browser search to rummage through the whole thing is great.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#104

Post by untog »

18pfsmt wrote: post #98
untog wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting that Amazon never seem to go down the acquisition route- if they did, Heroku could be a target. I really want someone to make an RDS-like service for Postgres. But I don't blame people for not trying right now, I'm sure Amazon will do it eventually.

Are you saying Amazon would buy Salesforce, or that Amazon would buy Heroku from Salesforce?

I actually forgot that Heroku had been bought out by Salesforce- but the point remains that before they sold, Amazon could have been tried competing in any buy out.

I can't quite believe Amazon has never acquired anyone, though- are there any high profile ones out there?

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#105

Post by Hupo »

jeffbarr wrote: post #94
Hupo wrote: post #90

The thing that annoys me about both this and Zencoder is that for people who are actually experienced with video encoding, there is absolutely no way to tweak eg. the underlying x264 settings. There's quite a few settings that have no effect on decoding in any way but are pretty important in getting the most out of the video at a given bitrate (most notably the strength/mode of AQ and psychovisual optimizations). In…

As is the case with every part of AWS, we add additional features and options over time based on customer feedback and requests. Please feel free to let us (or me -- jbarr@amazon.com) know what you need and I'll bring it to the team's attention within 30 minutes.

Sent a mail your way with more detailed impressions and thoughts.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#106

Post by wpietri »

jpdoctor wrote: post #102
wpietri wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust. Trust is the biggest factor in a platform decision, and they'd be foolish to put all their other business at risk for a temporary advantage in one small slice. Especially since they are still making money on every Zencoder job.

> I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. Really? One example: When states threatened sales tax (before CA), they cut off retailers in those states. They can and they have given people short shrift when it's in their business interest. To be fair, that just means they know how to increase sales by selecting who gets thrown to the lions, which is necessary in any business.

Sorry, I am speaking specifically of the AWS business.

I think most people making platform selections are mainly focused on AWS. I'm sure they pay some attention now to Amazon proper, but their affiliate programs were a peripheral thing, and

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#107

Post by wmf »

jessaustin wrote: post #96
njharman wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying this is the case. But there is such a thing as a vertical monopoly. Anticompetitive and illegal.

It's very hard to imagine a situation in which Amazon could lock new entrants out of the video encoding market. All you need to enter this market are a fast connection and a server farm, both of which you can get for yourself or rent from numerous IaaS providers. Amazon might very well have a price advantage, but other parties that can offer better quality of service or better L10n or whatever will still attract cust…

It would be shady if Amazon set their prices for video encoding below the price of raw EC2, because then competitors would be in trouble. But they haven't done that.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#108

Post by gtaylor »

juddlyon wrote: post #65

Zencoder has one of the nicest APIs I've ever used, it would take more than price for me to switch.

While this makes me (as a developer) happy, my customers don't care. They want encoding, they want it cheaper, and they want it better.

I am still tinkering, but for our purposes, it looks like Amazon's Transcoding service is going to be cheaper and of good enough quality to get the nod over Zencoder.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#109

Post by gtaylor »

d33pika wrote: post #11
gklitt wrote: post #4

Does anyone with experience using Zencoder ( http://zencoder.com/en/ ) see advantages/disadvantages of this new Amazon service compared to Zencoder, which has been around for a while? Zencoder is owned by Brightcove and I'm sure they will be fully capable of putting up a good fight, but I can't imagine this won't take a significant amount of business away from them...

I am also curious about the how fast the AWS service will be. Zencoder is pretty fast. http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-...

We've done some preliminary testing, and this AWS Transcoding service is very fast. It's good enough to the point where I don't even care to consider this a factor in our AWS vs Zencoder comparisons.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#110

Post by papsosouid »

untog wrote: post #92
jpdoctor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that can be made more cost effective in bulk I assume the Heroku guys have noticed by now. Hopefully they're working on designing Amazon out.

It is interesting that Amazon never seem to go down the acquisition route- if they did, Heroku could be a target. I really want someone to make an RDS-like service for Postgres. But I don't blame people for not trying right now, I'm sure Amazon will do it eventually.

Someone already did, like a year ago: http://www.enterprisedb.com/
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