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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.
by jpdoctor 15y ago
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.
- sp332 15y agoWould $6k include hardware, or just a software license?
- jpdoctor 15y agoSoftware only. Determine your need for the number of processors and add that on. I'm looking at their $2000/mo plan for 100,000 minutes of video. Compare: Modern hardware does HD faster than real time, there are 43,000 minutes in a month. So for a quad core machine, you already have a comfortable margin.
- jon_dahl 15y agoThis assumes that you can evenly distribute your transcoding load over the course of a month. For most customers, transcoding needs are severely peaky - 10x or more from peak-to-average. So you either buy for the peaks and your hardware goes idle 90% of the time, or buy for the average and see long queue times. For most video publishers, each on-premise machine ends up using only a small fraction of 43,000 minutes each month.
- jfb 15y agoAlso, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true.
- jpdoctor 15y ago> Also, that Rhozet/Main Concept/&c. are good enough, which in many cases is demonstrably not true Wha? You think that Zencoder wrote their own codecs? They're selling an API and cloud tech, and with 20 people are certainly wrapping somebody else's encoding.
- jfb 15y agoI'm not making a representation about our (1) tech so much as that of the other professional grade format conversion services. (1) I recently joined Zencoder. Consume appropriate amount of salt.
- jfb 15y agoAlso, do you have any idea what a broadcast grade format conversion box actually costs?
- jpdoctor 15y agoYes. My comments are not theoretical.
- jpdoctor 15y ago> This assumes that you can evenly distribute your transcoding load over the course of a month. No it does not. A low priced quad core is already in excess of their highest listed service, for less money. Put a dual hex xeon into service and you have at least 10x the capacity (remember that even HD transcodes at faster than real time), and it pays off in less than a year.
- Xixi 15y agoCost of bare hardware is not what makes companies move to the cloud. Hardware / software licenses is an investment, cloud is opex (operational expense): it means you don't invest much upfront (Zencode, Amazon, etc. made that investment for you), but you pay over time. If your treasury is low you may not even have a choice between investing or using the cloud to begin with. So you are going to say: in the long run, opex is more expensive than a wise investment that pan out well. That's called risk management, and is the main reason many companies choose cloud services over in-house. You might invest in the wrong hardware, the wrong licenses in the case of encoding audio/video, or the wrong Linux/*BSD/Windows administrators. Switching away from Zencoder is comparatively easy and cheap. It's a trade off, you are basically paying a premium to reduce your risks.
- jpdoctor 15y ago> paying a premium to reduce your risks. It's an exchange of risks, not a reduction. You incur a sizable business risk by putting a nonprofitable company in your critical path.
- jon_dahl 15y agoOur 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 15y ago> 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 15y agoCapital 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.
- jpdoctor 15y ago> you either carry a shitload of capacity that stands idle 90% of the time But costs less. THAT is the point. (A quad-core is almost there, dual hex xeons will provide 10x capacity. Not enough? Add more cores. At $2000/mo, the payoff is pretty easy in less than a year.) Look: You guys have a business which is not yet breaking even. Perhaps that will fix itself with a bunch more customers. But as with all businesses, once your invoices start showing up on the CFO's screen, he is going ask to design you out. He will walk down to the office of his head IT geek, who is always trying to justify his salary, and say: What does it cost to take this in-house? You think the IT geek is going to say: Oh no. We need to have that in the cloud. Really?
- jroseattle 15y agoHardly. Encoding is much more than setup.exe/dmg/rpm. $5-$6k for bits, but much more in service management and operation. If our application was positioned to take advantage of Zencoder, I would use their service in a second.
- lhnn 15y agoA Digital Rapids HD encoder was $50k for an enterprise customer I work with... where are you buying?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]