This is a fair question, and I have two answers. 1. Even if we were just using ffmpeg + simple scripts, we think there is value to using a service instead of o

This is a fair question, and I have two answers. 1. Even if we were just using ffmpeg + simple scripts, we think there is value to using a service instead of our customers running video encoding on their own. We offer easy integration, automatic scalability, a well-designed API, and customer support. So theoretically Amazon S3 is just a file server, but it's still worth using S3. In other words, even simple technology has some benefits when packaged as a service as opposed to managing the technology yourself. 2. Beyond that, we're much more than just ffmpeg. ffmpeg is awesome, and we use ffmpeg as maybe 25%-30% of the work in our encoding chain. But video technology is really messy. There are hundreds of edge cases and non-standard files/formats/settings. The best tools take you 95% of the way there, but the remaining 5% is exceptionally painful, and a few tools plus (simple) scripts don't get you to 99%, let alone 100%. That takes thousands of hours of work, and it really makes sense to let a service handle that, instead of thousands of companies doing that work themselves. Does that make sense?