Zencoder (YC W10) Wants To Be The AWS Of Video Encoding

Our pricing decreases as volume increases, so at a higher level, an hour of video is currently $1.68, not $3.60. At scale, we have other options we can offer (like dedicated servers at a fixed monthly price). We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course. :)

To your point, perhaps flat rate encoding pricing is better for high volumes.

Our flat rate transcoding pricing (http://www.advection.net/pricing/transcoding-pricing) is based on the idea of an encoding queue with bursting. Under the hood, it's a similar cloud approach, but more economical for those with volumes or steady encoding work. Customers--or their end users--can upload at any rate (volumes of upload sessions at once through gateways located around the country for low latency), or ship drives. The queues process at a steady predictable rate, delivering content directly to the network.

In the course of processing countless libraries for clients, we've found they tend to have such unique ideas about the end result that a "one size fits all" web service often doesn't meet their needs out of the box.

So, we also offer Windows Media (WMV), Silverlight (VC-1), Ogg Theora, and cross-player H.264 encoding, adaptive bitrate encoding for Apple devices, iPhone video rotation, automatic thumbnails, web postbacks so you don't have to poll, incoming files of up to 4.7GB in size, and arbitrarily complex encoding requirements.

To your point about images + sound, for example, some clients supply metadata as XML, and using the metadata we generate pre-roll and post-roll video footage that stitches onto the transcoded video.

(We also have a consumer service that bundles both encoding and storage into a single "per minute" price. Consumers shouldn't need to know about gigabytes.)

I agree. Also the industries that have large volumes of video to be encoded, who can afford that rate, are ones like "adult" -- and I believe Zencoder won't touch adult video conversion.

I know they have their reasons, and I respect them, but I do think it is a mistake and a limitation.

i might be wrong but they even had higher prices at launch

I was thinking they were targeting film and media agencies (high-end market); instead of the thousands little bootstrapping startups.

zencoder should look into colocating servers and having customized servers with a video card capable of video transcoding... their costs would lower dramatically

Hi ripb. Yep, our sales site needs a page that covers this. If you sign up and play around with the API, you'll see this info. At the moment, we do:

Input: just about everything

Output: H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP3 audio, in a MP4 or Flash 9+ container format. Ogg/vorbis/theora are coming soon, as are a few others that we can't talk about yet. We've decided to take the "narrow" approach for now - 99% of the demand that we see is for these five codecs (H.264, AAC, MP3, Theora, Vorbis). If there's anything in particular that you're looking for, let us know.

Yep, we're AWS at the moment. We're ultimately cloud agnostic, though, and can support other cloud environments (Rackspace Cloud, etc.) as well as our own servers. EC2 is pretty compelling for transcoding, though, because (1) so many people use S3 for video storage and delivery, and (2) Amazon's fastest servers (XL High CPU) are pretty fast - faster than most cloud servers.

At that time we had just released Flix Cloud. We have spent the last year supporting that product and learning from our customers. This release of Zencoder is the result.

As for the last question: when you're offered a spot in YC, you don't turn it down!