How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market

Also, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true.

> This assumes that you can evenly distribute your transcoding load over the course of a month.

No it does not.

A low priced quad core is already in excess of their highest listed service, for less money.

Put a dual hex xeon into service and you have at least 10x the capacity (remember that even HD transcodes at faster than real time), and it pays off in less than a year.

> paying a premium to reduce your risks.

It's an exchange of risks, not a reduction. You incur a sizable business risk by putting a nonprofitable company in your critical path.

> you either carry a shitload of capacity that stands idle 90% of the time

But costs less. THAT is the point. (A quad-core is almost there, dual hex xeons will provide 10x capacity. Not enough? Add more cores. At $2000/mo, the payoff is pretty easy in less than a year.)

Look: You guys have a business which is not yet breaking even. Perhaps that will fix itself with a bunch more customers. But as with all businesses, once your invoices start showing up on the CFO's screen, he is going ask to design you out. He will walk down to the office of his head IT geek, who is always trying to justify his salary, and say: What does it cost to take this in-house?

You think the IT geek is going to say: Oh no. We need to have that in the cloud.

Really?

With EC2, why do you need so much idle capacity? Just spin up more instances when demand picks up.

I'm probably missing something, so I'd be happy to be enlightened.

That doesn't really answer my question (and I am a potential customer). How exactly does zencoder add value to justify their additional costs? Converting video with ffmpeg is trivial in my experience. What exactly does zencoder do that's better than anyone else? Has zencoder actually extended ffmpeg in a deeply meaningful way--e.g. modified the codebase to handle new codecs, new containers, or transcode much, much faster than a basic ffmpeg install? The website is not particularly helpful in that regard and strikes me as a bunch of smoke and mirrors surrounding a pedestrian ffmpeg implementation running in the "cloud."

In my experience it is far more efficient to transcode very high resolution files (4k or even 1080p) locally, and then upload a real deliverable (at much greater speed now that it has been compressed).