

How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market - jon_dahl
http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/12/02/how-zencoder-became-the-largest-cloud-transcoding-service-on-the-market/

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dboyd
> Early on, we decided to focus on selling to engineers.

This shows in their documentation. I am working with their API, and everything
is very well documented.

This also shows in their support. Being able to jump into a Campfire room with
the same people who commit to their github repos makes for quickly resolved
issues.

Keep up the good work Zencoder!

~~~
tomsaffell
Seconded. The docs great and the support is first class. And the API-request
builder extremely useful when getting started.

------
jameskilton
Switching to Zencoder was the best decision my company made to handle video
uploads. They seriously are the best, by far. They even support full HD and
audio only, and there are just a few file formats they don't yet support (like
GoToMeeting).

If you need video encoding, use Zencoder. Don't even try to figure out your
own ffmpeg or related solution, it's not worth the effort.

~~~
jpdoctor
> Don't even try to figure out your own ffmpeg or related solution, it's not
> worth the effort.

Or you could, I don't know, consider other for-pay solutions.

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aculver
I absolutely love Zencoder! Highly recommended.

I wanted to encourage our customers to upload screencast style video demos of
their apps to be presented within a product shot of an iPhone or iPad on their
website (e.g. <http://aeirtalk.com/> and
<http://homemarks.limelightapp.com/>). In order to present the videos using
HTML 5, it turned out we must encode the videos into three different formats
(H.264, Ogg Theora, WebM.) Zencoder's API request builder made this a total
breeze! I don't think I ever read the API documentation. Furthermore, I never
have to worry about what format our customers are uploading.

We don't do a ton of video encoding, so our bill is never more than a few
bucks a month. It's better than free when you consider how much time we didn't
waste maintaining a server with ffmpeg on it. :)

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untog
One feature Zencoder still doesn't have (AFAIK?) that I find invaluable is
allowing users to upload directly to the encoding service, bypassing your
server entirely.

Thankfully, Transloadit (no, not affiliated, just a happy customer) does offer
that service- it means that we don't have to worry about handling user uploads
as well as not worrying about video encoding.

~~~
aculver
The solution is to pair Zencoder up with something like Amazon S3. We run on
Heroku, so we _must_ allow our customers to bypass our server when uploading
videos. (Heroku has a 10 MB upload limit.) In Rails I use the s3_swf_upload
gem to allow folks to upload directly to our S3 buckets. When uploading is
done between the browser and S3, a JavaScript callback method hits our server
and tells it where the upload is so that the app can keep track of the file
and tell Zencoder to do it's thing on the file. If you decide to do this, let
me know if you need any help.

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ww520
Zencoder looks good. I'm curious on how their billing process works, or how
billing works for PaaS. Does customer prepay to buy credit or do they invoice
a customer monthly?

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awm
Any estimate as to the time of transcoded content? Also, does the term "video"
mean # movies in, or # of streams (movie at certain bitrate/width/etc) out?

------
jpdoctor
Strange business. Professional encoding tools are about $5-6K, so they cater
to folks who have large needs, but not large enough to warrant a $6K
investment.

~~~
jon_dahl
Our business isn't professional encoding vs. [unprofessional encoding?]. It's
cloud vs. non-cloud. We do what the "professional" non-cloud tools do, but in
the cloud, and we have many customers who are investing more than $6,000.

(We're also entirely API-based for programmatic high-volume encoding, so if
you're thinking of things like video editing and manual post-production,
that's not really what we do.)

~~~
jpdoctor
> _We're also entirely API-based for programmatic high-volume encoding_

So why wouldn't folks use the API on (say) Rhozet's tool and maintain control
of the flow?

> _We do what the "professional" non-cloud tools do, but in the cloud,_

Yes, I assume that you have a "professional" engine since you have a team of
only 20 people.

> _and we have many customers who are investing more than $6,000._

Kudos. Now when they find out that they can take the transcoding API in house
for about that much money, what financial incentive will they have to stay
with Zencoder?

~~~
jfb
Capital expenditure. Video encoding is bursty; you either carry a shitload of
capacity that stands idle 90% of the time, in order to guarantee SLAs for
clients at peak times; or you don't, and you get to explain to the EVP at
_e.g._ Paramount why their content is falling behind.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I worked pro video at Apple and am now a very happy employee
of Zencoder.

~~~
ajays
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.

~~~
jfb
That's exactly the point of doing the work in the cloud as opposed to buying a
giant stack of machines.

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Joeboy
Oh is that what it is. I'd seen the name but imagined it was to do with
Buddhism influenced programming or something.

------
maximusprime
Not to be harsh, but how many other transcoding services are there? I can
think of none.

~~~
malkia
That was posted few weeks ago. It's from zencoder's site, comparing to other 3
competitors (probably biased), but shows that there is already competition:

[http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-
benchmarked-2x-...](http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-
benchmarked-2x-10x-faster-than-the-competition/)

~~~
9999
Sorry, but I can't help but feel that it wouldn't be that difficult to get
similar performance by setting up a free AMI for people to do exactly this
sort of thing using their own EC2 instance. What kind of value does zencoder
actually add vs. running an ec2 instance with ffmpeg handling the transcoding?

~~~
jfb
Video is extraordinarily complex?

~~~
9999
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).

~~~
jon_dahl
Hi 9999 - get in touch if you want to go into more detail:
<http://zencoder.com/contact>.

As a short answer, though, we're actually quite cheap for most customers.
Major internet publishers use Zencoder for a few hundred dollars/month. Large-
volume providers use us for less than the cost of a full-time engineer - and
the alternative to Zencoder at large scale is a team, not a single engineer.
Mission-critical encoding requires a lot of engineering and operations, even
when starting from the excellent open-source libraries available.

Beyond that, we generally do things faster, more reliably, and at higher
quality than "default" encoding systems, especially around the edges. That's
what happens when you throw >10,000 hours of engineering at this problem.
Again, get in touch if you want specifics.

~~~
jfb
Just to compare/contrast, we do more video/minute at Zencoder than the iTunes
video ingest system could handle, with many fewer engineers, a far smaller
budget, and a much broader set of capabilities.

To a certain extent, this is an apples and oranges comparison, but the service
model really seems to fit precisely with video encoding (or I wouldn't be
here).

