I would think along the same lines. Then recently I was doing contract work that included ability to upload and preview video files. My client had a very averag

I would think along the same lines. Then recently I was doing contract work that included ability to upload and preview video files. My client had a very average vps and was not willing to spend much on having me install/test a bunch of packages to get video conversion going. Bring in zencoder and I had video uploads working for him in a couple hours. (Granted, I think someone who knows their stuff when it comes to ffmpeg etc. could very well do this in two hours without zencoder, I think. Nonetheless, this is one use case.)