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Amazon Elastic Transcoder

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Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#131

Post by edgesrazor »

We're using Encoding.com right now which works off the AWS infrastructure. We pre-paid and got our pricing down to $0.018 per megabyte. The drawback to this method is that encoding charges you for MB in AND MB out, whereas Amazon and Zencoder are charging just by the minute of output.

I'm pretty happy with Encoding.com but after running some test files through AWS, I have to seriously consider switching - AWS seems much faster (not a controlled test, more is needed) and in our case it's much easier to predict costs by going with a per minute model than a per MB in/out. An added bonus - boto already has support for it.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#132

Post by zikzikzik »

wmf wrote: post #107
jessaustin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why (on Earth) would it be shady?!

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#133

Post by donavanm »

pcj wrote: post #125
jmartens wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure has no shot at this market....none.

Curious...why you say that?

Azure, in general, is just burning money with no significant uptake. Friends who work there say there aren't even significant internal uses. Just based on that I'd be dubious of any new Azure service dominating their segment. Maybe they'll buy themselves another Xbox situation, but I don't see it yet.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#134

Post by doublec »

papsosouid wrote: post #112
jeffbarr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There has to be webm output support, firefox and chrome don't support mp4. And as always, it would really be helpful if s3 supported notifications, so you could automatically put a message into SQS or add a job to this new transcoding service when a file is uploaded to a bucket.

Chrome still supports MP4 as far as I know. They mentioned dropping support a couple of years ago but didn't.

Firefox is getting MP4 support. Firefox OS and Firefox for Android on some devices has it already. Support on some versions of Windows is in nightly builds hidden behind a preference setting. Linux support is hidden behind a build switch. At some point when these backends are stable they'll be in normal builds.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#135

Post by brownbat »

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.

> The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust.

Is there a lot of that left since they knocked Netflix offline on Christmas eve?

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#136

Post by ersii »

Hm, I havn't used Amazons Web Services earlier - since most of their services looks to be priced in a good range, when suddenly you read the fine print about the bandwidth charges.

I've been trying to read through about Amazon Elastic Transcoder (AET?)'s pricing - but I can't figure out the total. I assume you need to pay to get the video out of S3? Do you have to pay on the way in, as well?

What would it cost to encode a 20 minute HD video that's like, 500MB?

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#137

Post by dhbanes »

jon_dahl wrote: post #91
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…

Zencoder here. Amazon has done a good job of making their pricing look simpler/cheaper than ours, and for some customers, it is. Two quick comments. 1. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already. 2. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value. We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.

I've been using Zencoder for a little over a year now and it's been a great experience. We're definitely not one of your larger customers, paying about $100-$120 a month (and rising) on HD transcoding jobs.

At our level, switching to AWS would reduce our per minute cost from $0.08 (HD costing 2x normal minutes) to $0.03 (62.5% cheaper). So our $120 bill would go down to $45.

As a small startup, every $1 makes a difference and the price discrepancy will only increase as our usage increases.

I'm curious if you're concerned about erosion of your low-volume customer base eventually leading lost revenue from future high-volume customers.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#138

Post by alttab »

igravious wrote: post #111
untog wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

eh? From the bottom of the Amazon.com homepage ... --- AbeBooks AfterSchool.com Audible BeautyBar.com Book Depository Bookworm.com Casa.com CreateSpace Diapers.com DPReview Fabric IMDb Junglee.com MYHABIT Shopbop Soap.com Vine.com Wag.com Woot Yoyo.com Zappos

Most of those look like online retailers and not iaas or compute services companies.

No one builds services like amazon. They aren't interested in bolting on someone else's idea company.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#139

Post by d33pika »

ersii wrote: post #136

Hm, I havn't used Amazons Web Services earlier - since most of their services looks to be priced in a good range, when suddenly you read the fine print about the bandwidth charges. I've been trying to read through about Amazon Elastic Transcoder (AET?)'s pricing - but I can't figure out the total. I assume you need to pay to get the video out of S3? Do you have to pay on the way in, as well? What would it cost to enc…

Data transfer in to S3 is free. First 1GB/month transfer out is free,after that it is 0.12GB for the next 10TB. These rates would apply if you store your video on S3 and use another service like zencoder too. The transfer between EC2 and S3 in same region is free though.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#140

Post by d33pika »

gtaylor wrote: post #109
d33pika wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you share any numbers? How long did it take to encode a 30 minute HD clip?
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