I get what you're saying, but Zencoder's product isn't an encoder, its a cloud based encoding service (we're happy customers) as a consumer the actual implement

I get what you're saying, but Zencoder's product isn't an encoder, its a cloud based encoding service (we're happy customers) as a consumer the actual implementation is a black box, as an engineer I appreciate the process they went through and also appreciate that they explained the way they got there. If Heroku switched from Apache to Nginx and saw a marked improvement in the performance I'm find with them saying "We're serving pages 5x faster".