<story><title>Amazon Elastic Transcoder</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrisacky</author><text>It&apos;s quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;much more cost effective&lt;/i&gt; (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 credits for HD video on Zencoder).&lt;p&gt;If you spend $2000 with AWS, you would be getting 33% more value. (Remember, this is operating at scale. The savings can be even larger)... and this is really the best case scenario for Zencoder.&lt;p&gt;If you are &quot;just getting started&quot;, the savings are immediate. On Zencoder it&apos;s $0.10 for HD video, compared to $0.03 on AWS.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    [1] : http://zencoder.com/en/pricing&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jon_dahl</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;1. Our larger customers don&apos;t pay more than this already.&lt;p&gt;2. Paying 33% less doesn&apos;t necessarily mean getting 33% more value.&lt;p&gt;We&apos;ll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we&apos;ve known about this for a long time, and we aren&apos;t worried.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Elastic Transcoder</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrisacky</author><text>It&apos;s quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;much more cost effective&lt;/i&gt; (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 credits for HD video on Zencoder).&lt;p&gt;If you spend $2000 with AWS, you would be getting 33% more value. (Remember, this is operating at scale. The savings can be even larger)... and this is really the best case scenario for Zencoder.&lt;p&gt;If you are &quot;just getting started&quot;, the savings are immediate. On Zencoder it&apos;s $0.10 for HD video, compared to $0.03 on AWS.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    [1] : http://zencoder.com/en/pricing&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zimbatm</author><text>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&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;What is also means is that if your company provides a service to other developers you might well be in competition with Amazon in the future.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Maybe I should mention that I work at PandaStream, another video transcoding service. We&apos;re still cheaper with 100% utilisation but our pricing model and target market isn&apos;t exactly the same.</text></comment>