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Comment by exline | Hacker News Reader

I like the site. Very nice job. I don't know how big your market it is. It appears to be targeted at developers, but we are the ones most likely to roll our own solution to this type of thing. I think I would be more apt to want to buy a one time license and run the software myself, then to commit to a monthly service fee.

Perhaps you should looking at a consumer market where you would do the work and then host it yourself for them giving them a link, or publish it to a subset of popular sites (facebook, flickr, youtube, wordpress, etc.) Your typical users on these sites will not/cannot leverage libraries to do what your service does. Make it easy for them to just upload & publish so they don't have to think about it.

Just my thoughts.

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When you're launching a startup where video encoding is one of the core component you don't really have the time to roll your own solution.

Doing an automated solution to encode videos is not easy and it takes time.

Having easy and cheap solutions like this make you gain valuable time in the early stage and even later.

Thats exactly what Particles do, they have two services ; one for encoding (heywatch) and the second one spread the videos to multiple services and provide analytics (Heyspread).

I was referring to leveraging an existing solution (open source or otherwise) when rolling your own solution. Not re-writing from scratch

I was involved in a start up a while back where video encoding was a tiny part of what we were doing and while it was painful to get working, I don't know if we would have committed to a monthly service.

Take my comments with a grain of salt since I'm not your target customer.

Good idea to service consumers, but Dropbox already does this.

Maybe charge a transactional fee and let the developer pay for the hosting with S3 themselves (most developers already have S3 accounts). This keeps the revenue directly in line with where you add value.

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