Fair question. What you get is scalability (Softlayer is explicitly for low-volume transcoding), an API (Softlayer might have one, though it's not documented at

Fair question. What you get is scalability (Softlayer is explicitly for low-volume transcoding), an API (Softlayer might have one, though it's not documented at the above link), a lower error rate, higher visual quality, better compression, more options, and hands-on customer support. Not everyone needs these things, but many people do.