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Amazon Elastic Transcoder

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Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#91

Post by jon_dahl »

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.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#92

Post by untog »

jpdoctor wrote: post #85
untog wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#93

Post by potta »

While Amazon's service has a price advantage, there are some differences that could justify Zencoder's premium for some customers.

Amazon gives you a maximum of 4 encoding pipelines. These operate like queues. If you are processing many jobs simultaneously, and encoding multiple versions of each video, then those queues could start to build up. With Zencoder, all your jobs are processed in parallel, no matter how much you throw at it. In my experience, queue times with Zencoder have averaged For batch jobs, that aren't sensitive to encoding times Amazon's queues shouldn't be a problem (ex - a media company encoding a huge library into a bunch of different formats). Business video services or online video platforms may want to optimize around keeping queue times low to get client videos out quickly.

Zencoder also seems to be working on premium services like closed captioning (an FCC rule says that programming that is shown on TV must have closed captioning when it is shown on the web), live streaming, and packaging HLS streams. Finally, Zencoder supports formats like ProRes 422, that Amazon may not (I haven't seen a list of input formats yet). Zencoder also has great support and a great API.

I'm a Zencoder customer and don't have any vested interest in the company. In fact, I'll be taking a look at the service to see if it meets our needs. I just wanted to highlight that if you are making a decision around transcoding, you need to define your requirements, understand the trade offs, and test the different options.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#94

Post by jeffbarr »

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.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#95

Post by jpdoctor »

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.

> 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?

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#96

Post by jessaustin »

njharman wrote: post #60
kcg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 customers. This is how markets are "supposed" to work.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#97

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

Well of course not. Paying 33% less means 50% more value!

But in all seriousness I look forward to the post.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#98

Post by 18pfsmt »

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.

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

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#99

Post by wpietri »

jpdoctor wrote: post #95
jon_dahl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Amazon Elastic Transcoder

#100

Post by infinite8s »

zimbatm wrote: post #42
mikecane wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>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.

Not only developers. They are also upending all intermediary businesses between manufacturers and consumers (inventory, shipping, etc).
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