9 ms·

Amazon Elastic Transcoder

242 points by chrisacky 14y ago

steeve 14y ago
Well well well, 2 weeks after Azure announces their transcoder, look what happens :)
- facorreia 14y ago
  I couldn't find a link to this announcement. Could you point me to it?
  - biot 14y ago
    Announcement: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/22/microsoft-releases-azure-media-services-helping-developers-deliver-scalable-streaming-video-to-any-device/ http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/22/microsoft-release... Site: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/media-services/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/media-servic...
    - facorreia 14y ago
      Thanks!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- mmastrac 14y ago
  There's no way that Amazon heard Azure's announcement and shipped this within two weeks from scratch.
  - upthedale 14y ago
    The announcement 2 weeks ago was just for public availability. Its been public knowledge for much longer. See this from last April: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/04/16/announcing-windows-azure-media-services.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/04/16/announcing...
  - joshmlewis 14y ago
    Everyone look at this guy! He's got logic!
    - joshmlewis 14y ago
      I'm sorry for the above comment everyone. Reddit has infected my humor. I shouldn't have brought it here. :(
- jmartens 14y ago
  Azure has no shot at this market....none.
  - pcj 14y ago
    Curious...why you say that?
    - donavanm 14y ago
      Azure, in general, is just burning money with no significant uptake. Friends who work there say there aren't even significant internal uses. Just based on that I'd be dubious of any new Azure service dominating their segment. Maybe they'll buy themselves another Xbox situation, but I don't see it yet.
justincormack 14y ago
Ah yes. Remember if you run services that compete with what Amazon might do you may have a problem. There are many businesses in this space running on AWS.
gklitt 14y ago
Does anyone with experience using Zencoder (http://zencoder.com/en/ http://zencoder.com/en/) see advantages/disadvantages of this new Amazon service compared to Zencoder, which has been around for a while? Zencoder is owned by Brightcove and I'm sure they will be fully capable of putting up a good fight, but I can't imagine this won't take a significant amount of business away from them...
- zwily 14y ago
  Surprisingly, Elastic Transcoder doesn't look to be very price competitive with Zencoder at scale. Zencoder is $0.02/minute, while this is $0.015 (stdef) and $0.030 (hidef). If you're doing hidef content, Zencoder is a clear (pricing) win. EDIT: Never mind... Zencoder charges double for hidef content too.
  - d33pika 14y ago
    Zencoder charges double the normal rate for HD videos, so it is $0.04 for HD
- d33pika 14y ago
  AWS only supports MP4, zencoder supports a whole host of them,significant being TS files for HTTP Live streaming needed by IOS devices.
  - cloudshoring 14y ago
    I transcoded it in to FLV and it worked www.cloudshoring.in
- d33pika 14y ago
  I am also curious about the how fast the AWS service will be. Zencoder is pretty fast. http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-10x-faster-than-the-competition/ http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-...
  - 14y ago
garrynewman 14y ago
I love aws
chrisacky 14y ago
It's quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market. Take Zencoder for example (which is one of my favourite players in this field)... if you are to compare the prices with say Zencoder [1] AWS is much more cost effective (by several factors). Even if you were operating at scale and spending $2000 per month with Zencoder, you would only get 50,000minutes worth of HD Video. (You pay 2 minutes worth of credits for HD video on Zencoder). If you spend $2000 with AWS, you would be getting 33% more value. (Remember, this is operating at scale. The savings can be even larger)... and this is really the best case scenario for Zencoder. If you are "just getting started", the savings are immediate. On Zencoder it's $0.10 for HD video, compared to $0.03 on AWS. I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. [1] : http://zencoder.com/en/pricing
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- zimbatm 14y ago
  Not really. Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market. Remember, they're playing for the long-run. Maybe they needed it to convert their videos on LoveFilm.com or maybe another future service connected with their Cloud Drive. What is also means is that if your company provides a service to other developers you might well be in competition with Amazon in the future. EDIT: Maybe I should mention that I work at PandaStream, another video transcoding service. We're still cheaper with 100% utilisation but our pricing model and target market isn't exactly the same.
  - mikecane 14y ago
    >>>Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market Yes. But I don't recall reading anywhere that Amazon would or even could offer this. It makes me wonder what else there is they will sell. Warehousing software? Shipping logistics? Anyone have a list?
hayksaakian 14y ago
Interesting. Are there any consumer facing apps using these services (aws transcode competitors/zencoder)? Could this be used to stream live video?
- d33pika 14y ago
  Zencoder recently came out with live transcoding. Its only a transcoding service, but I guess using brightcove you can stream live videos. AWS has only announced file base transcoding.
roel_v 14y ago
Only h264/AAC/mp4 output though. I wonder how well they handle embedded subtitle streams, too (I don't even know if they're supported at all for mp4). Seems OK for the most basic of web video streaming, but then again, I guess that's the majority of the use cases they're targeting. (more concretely, this doesn't look to be suitable for digitizing dvd collections).
ireland 14y ago
I'm sorry to say this but doesn't this mean the end for Zencoder, TransLoadIT and other video encoding services?
- hisyam 14y ago
  Using that logic, all the other cloud storage services would be out of business right now.
- jqueryfan33 14y ago
  Transloadit doesn't do video only, it does much more. Not sure about Zencoder and Pandastream.
borplk 14y ago
Damn pretty smart move. They place themselves in the 'lowest common denominator' of the industry. Whilst the smaller companies and startups compete and struggle to find the right combination of factors for their awesome video/web/cloud/storage/etc product at the end of the day they all need the same kind of thing to operate on and Amazon is often the cheapest option to start with and it serves the whole industry making little cents tick tick tick one after another...
Tekker 14y ago
The Porn industry just took a huge step forward. :)
- level09 14y ago
  Amazon doesn't allow porn content on its servers ..
  - true_religion 14y ago
    I just checked their AUP, and it doesn't seem to say that [1]. This makes sense since AWS is pretty much a content agnostic system that you pay for by the hour and otherwise have no interaction with amazon staff. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/aup/ http://aws.amazon.com/aup/
- donavanm 14y ago
  Nah, porn companies are generally too cheap to use services like aws.
neotek 14y ago
How about audio transcoding? At my music startup we're building a transcoding backend that will take in FLAC, AIFF, or WAV and spit out MP3, FLAC, AAC, ALAC, and OGG files for people to download, and I'd kill for a transcoding service with a robust API that can deliver those formts.
- donavanm 14y ago
  Nope, video only. Audio is a logical step though. Go bug your friendly neighborhood rep/support person with a feature request.
- cwh 14y ago
  build it
  - hartator 14y ago
    love that
  - yoaviram 14y ago
    +1
  - nmcfarl 14y ago
    No need to build it - Zencoder already does it. -- Edit: looks like they only support these audio codecs: aac, ac3, amr, eac3, mp3, vorbis, and wma https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/format-and-codecs/audio-codec https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/format-and-codecs...
    - jon_dahl 14y ago
      We've thought hard about Opus, FLAC, and ALAC. Don't be surprised if you see those soon...
- jqueryfan33 14y ago
  Check out http://transloadit.com http://transloadit.com
ericcholis 14y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix assisted in this.
pdknsk 14y ago
Why is the pricing tier so static? $0,030: 1920 x 1080 @ 62500 kbps ... 1280 x 720 @ 17500 kbps
dangravell 14y ago
Who's the market? Surely crappy upload speeds and download caps stop this being used by 'consumers'.
jeffbarr 14y ago
Here's my blog post with some additional info: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/01/amazon-elastic-transcoder.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/01/amazon-elastic-transcoder...
klinquist 14y ago
Why haven't they started pushing these jobs down to distributed clients? I'd love to run an Amazon Transcoding app on my PC and earn credit that I can spend toward other Amazon services.
- EricBurnett 14y ago
  1, privacy - they would have to send you a copy of someone's video for that. 2, I expect the end user bandwidth is worth more than the CPU time you'd provide, so the credits they could give wouldn't be worth it to you.
  - klinquist 14y ago
    Well, there are ways around #1. It seems they could split a video up into enough chunks to make the bandwidth minimal for each party involved (it may not be worth it for /them/, however).
    - gosub 14y ago
      Or they could use homomorphic encryption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
      - Dylan16807 14y ago
        Do you seriously think you can get any kind of reasonable compression using only operations that are data-independent?
    - kevingadd 14y ago
      Video encoding tends to rely heavily on previous frames so it's not trivial to split a video into small chunks for encoding and still get a good result.
- wmf 14y ago
  You might be insulted when you saw how little they could afford to pay you. The idle time on random PCs is worth less than the overhead cost of managing it.
WordSkill 14y ago
Amazon should complement this new transcoding service and their existing media streaming (via Cloudfront) with a full media server, along the lines of Red5 or Wowza or Adobe Media Server, that would allow you to do more advanced stuff, such as capturing video from users, hosting video chatrooms etc. You can already run Wowza instances on EC2 but the premium on top of standard AWS prices is too high, if this functionality can be commoditized there will be an explosion of innovative new uses.
- gtCameron 14y ago
  I agree. We have been trying to scale our Wowza on EC2 setup for live video streaming, but after looking at our options it was about the same price to just go with a VDN like Edgecast that managed the server complexity for us. If Amazon could support live streaming through Cloudfront I think they could undercut the existing VDNs on pricing and have a big opportunity in that market.
dagge 14y ago
Wow, that product page is just massive. It tires me so much just looking at it that I'd rather just browse along. I'd like to see what designers looking to build up their portfolio could do with the Amazon AWS products.
- wpietri 14y ago
  I think the problem may be your lack of interest. As somebody who has used AWS a fair bit, I love those massive pages. It's easy for me to jump around, and being able to use in-browser search to rummage through the whole thing is great.
- jmartens 14y ago
  In contrast, see http://gridvid.me http://gridvid.me
contingencies 14y ago
As someone who worked until a couple of years ago in this field, I should point out that the larger area of value in the industry is the capacity to customize content for the consumer scenario (available bandwidth, CPU, resolution, available buffer size, CODEC support, etc.) and to do so automatically. The notion of precomputing various versions of a piece of media is not a new one, nor a particularly valuable one, since consumers rarely know which option to select. What users really need is something that perfectly matches their viewing scenario and their device (largely mobile). The knowledge of what works well on each device (with default settings) is the real gem here, and the capacity to deliver it ASAP (eg. transcoding in real time) is the service to supply. There are far more codec options than you can shake a stick at, and they do affect playback quality - especially during higher and lower bitrate portions of the media, and especially on lower end mobile devices (essentially today's global internet access norm). While the standard tool in this area is ffmpeg, one should note that not all of its algorithms can be parallelized, so real time delivery is a thornier problem than you might expect. Also, while there are device databases that can tell you resolution from an HTTP User Agent string, none of these will tell you CODEC support and functional bitrate limitations. The manufacturers, hastily throwing together devices from third party chip SDKs, often don't know these specs themselves. Throw in subtitle stream rendering support and the corresponding font problems, and things get really fun really quickly. Good luck to anyone in this area, I for one am glad to have left!
- jfb 14y ago
  Only hard problems are worth solving. I for one find it a very interesting field to be working in.
  - contingencies 14y ago
    I am glad to hear that you are interested in your work, as pleasure in work can be hard to find. Apologies for being in a philosophical mood: I contemplated not responding, and responding otherwise, but finally thought that offering this anecdote might be interesting. Please, take from it what you will. A Buddhist I know said that the thing that troubled them about the digital media field was how it conflicted with their great respect for some of the ideas that are central to that philosophy. They said that they identified much modern media consumption as intoxication of the mind with what may amount to trivial experiences tangential to achieving happiness and peace, which they viewed as quite apart from the endless sensory experiences of the world. (For a simple example, they pointed to Youtube) After some searching, this seems to be the reference: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma-ajivo/index.html http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma... A [lay person] should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison. Personally my friend's perspective did make me feel a little guilty about my work, since I am also (if sporadically) very interested in Buddhist philosophy and because encouraging people to spend their time "in earnest" (from a Buddhist perspective) is no doubt a personal failure as seen by the Buddhist teachings, in so far as I can grasp them myself. Yet, Buddhism also teaches that we should respect the treasure of conscience as a means to change our ways, and it is certainly true that communications of any kind can certainly be a bringer of good ... as well as thoughtless trivia.
yoda_sl 14y ago
It will not be surprising that in fact Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in fact what Netflix with Amazon's help may have work on in the past few years. Netflix is well known to use Amazon web services not only for the streaming part but even for doing all the movies encoding for all different devices they need to support. So I will not be surprise that it has now become a mature project that Amazon is now opening up, similar to the other service for S3 where you can ship your hard drive to upload directly on S3 without wasting bandwidth: from what I recall that service was in fact created initially for Netflix but later on open to third party.
juddlyon 14y ago
Zencoder has one of the nicest APIs I've ever used, it would take more than price for me to switch.
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  This needs more upvotes so it remains visible to all the people in at the top of the discussion who think Zencoder lives and dies on price alone.
- gtaylor 14y ago
  While this makes me (as a developer) happy, my customers don't care. They want encoding, they want it cheaper, and they want it better. I am still tinkering, but for our purposes, it looks like Amazon's Transcoding service is going to be cheaper and of good enough quality to get the nod over Zencoder.
brianbreslin 14y ago
Idea: build a pretty web based UI or software downloadable UI for this and mark up the costs to be just under zencoder's pricing. Would that be viable? for people who need 1 off transcoding they load up $20 of credits minimum or something. If someone wants to do it, I have a domain I've been sitting on which would be good for this.
- aysar 14y ago
  Precisely what I was thinking... I'm probably going to jump on to this... do a 2-4 week hack at it and launch it. If anyone wants to partner, let me know (I can design and play full stack- either one). Let me know what the domain is, I may be interested.
  - brianbreslin 14y ago
    encloudit.com just have a dummy wordpress site on it.
  - alttab 14y ago
    Be careful. You are playing the price game. Long term winning strategies don't start with undercutting.
brown9-2 14y ago
Pricing this per-video-minute seems pretty smart (not familiar with the space so I'm not sure if this is how it is generally done). As their CPUs get faster, they can transcode the same video for the same price for less cost to Amazon.
- jmartens 14y ago
  Pretty standard way to price....Zencoder pioneered it a few years ago.
Hupo 14y ago
The thing that annoys me about both this and Zencoder is that for people who are actually experienced with video encoding, there is absolutely no way to tweak eg. the underlying x264 settings. There's quite a few settings that have no effect on decoding in any way but are pretty important in getting the most out of the video at a given bitrate (most notably the strength/mode of AQ and psychovisual optimizations). In case of AWS, there doesn't even seem to be any kind of "general" tuning (like whether the content is film, animation, extremely grainy or so - x264 has --tune settings for these among others - Zencoder at least allows you to access this option[1]) options available, making it pretty much "one size fits all". I could always rent a generic server and use that for my encoding needs, but it'd be much more convenient if these cloud transcoding services simply offered advanced configuration for people who know what they are doing. Also, even for a "simple" cloud transcoding service, Amazon's offering is pretty limited in what it can do right now[2] - you can basically only encode H.264 & AAC in MP4, define the profile, level and bitrate, and that's about it. Zencoder has much more options in comparison and has generally more transparency in regards to what their encoding software actually does (sadly when I asked them about getting access to x264 settings directly, they replied along the lines of "they could change and things might break for users!" - which I don't think would be an actual issue since the direct settings ought to be for advanced users only, and they should be aware of things changing - plus Zencoder could just notify users of direct settings before they upgrade so they have time to adjust their settings if necessary). [1] https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/h264/tuning https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/h264/tuning [2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/developerguide/preset-settings.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/develope...
- jeffbarr 14y ago
  As is the case with every part of AWS, we add additional features and options over time based on customer feedback and requests. Please feel free to let us (or me -- jbarr@amazon.com) know what you need and I'll bring it to the team's attention within 30 minutes.
  - Hupo 14y ago
    Sent a mail your way with more detailed impressions and thoughts.
potta 14y ago
While Amazon's service has a price advantage, there are some differences that could justify Zencoder's premium for some customers. Amazon gives you a maximum of 4 encoding pipelines. These operate like queues. If you are processing many jobs simultaneously, and encoding multiple versions of each video, then those queues could start to build up. With Zencoder, all your jobs are processed in parallel, no matter how much you throw at it. In my experience, queue times with Zencoder have averaged <10 seconds. For batch jobs, that aren't sensitive to encoding times Amazon's queues shouldn't be a problem (ex - a media company encoding a huge library into a bunch of different formats). Business video services or online video platforms may want to optimize around keeping queue times low to get client videos out quickly. Zencoder also seems to be working on premium services like closed captioning (an FCC rule says that programming that is shown on TV must have closed captioning when it is shown on the web), live streaming, and packaging HLS streams. Finally, Zencoder supports formats like ProRes 422, that Amazon may not (I haven't seen a list of input formats yet). Zencoder also has great support and a great API. I'm a Zencoder customer and don't have any vested interest in the company. In fact, I'll be taking a look at the service to see if it meets our needs. I just wanted to highlight that if you are making a decision around transcoding, you need to define your requirements, understand the trade offs, and test the different options.
jmartens 14y ago
great news for customers....
jmartens 14y ago
The most interesting part of this move is what it says about their relations with EC2 customers. Most cloud encoders that ET will compte with, run on EC2.
mikey_p 14y ago
Am I reading this right, in that there is no support for WebM/VP8? If so, I'm a bit confused as to who this product is supposed to be for, it seems not suitable for generic web video. Is this intended to be for mobile only?
ketralnis 14y ago
Wow, they really are tailoring their service for Netflix specifically these days.
- jmartens 14y ago
  no way Netflix would use this service...they'll stick with EC2 and do their own encoding.
edgesrazor 14y ago
We're using Encoding.com right now which works off the AWS infrastructure. We pre-paid and got our pricing down to $0.018 per megabyte. The drawback to this method is that encoding charges you for MB in AND MB out, whereas Amazon and Zencoder are charging just by the minute of output. I'm pretty happy with Encoding.com but after running some test files through AWS, I have to seriously consider switching - AWS seems much faster (not a controlled test, more is needed) and in our case it's much easier to predict costs by going with a per minute model than a per MB in/out. An added bonus - boto already has support for it.
- edgesrazor 14y ago
  EDIT: I made one of my typical decimal blunders - we are paying $0.0018 per megabyte. Big difference.
ersii 14y ago
Hm, I havn't used Amazons Web Services earlier - since most of their services looks to be priced in a good range, when suddenly you read the fine print about the bandwidth charges. I've been trying to read through about Amazon Elastic Transcoder (AET?)'s pricing - but I can't figure out the total. I assume you need to pay to get the video out of S3? Do you have to pay on the way in, as well? What would it cost to encode a 20 minute HD video that's like, 500MB?
- d33pika 14y ago
  Data transfer in to S3 is free. First 1GB/month transfer out is free,after that it is 0.12GB for the next 10TB. These rates would apply if you store your video on S3 and use another service like zencoder too. The transfer between EC2 and S3 in same region is free though.
  - ersii 14y ago
    Ah, alrighty. Thanks!
shn 14y ago
Could this be a trend for Amazon that they'll expand vertically? If that is the case they'll be competing with their customers eventually.

242 points by chrisacky 14y ago

steeve 14y ago

Well well well, 2 weeks after Azure announces their transcoder, look what happens :)

facorreia 14y ago
I couldn't find a link to this announcement. Could you point me to it?
- biot 14y ago
  Announcement: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/22/microsoft-releases-azure-media-services-helping-developers-deliver-scalable-streaming-video-to-any-device/ http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/22/microsoft-release... Site: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/media-services/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/media-servic...
  - facorreia 14y ago
    Thanks!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
mmastrac 14y ago
There's no way that Amazon heard Azure's announcement and shipped this within two weeks from scratch.
- upthedale 14y ago
  The announcement 2 weeks ago was just for public availability. Its been public knowledge for much longer. See this from last April: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/04/16/announcing-windows-azure-media-services.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/04/16/announcing...
- joshmlewis 14y ago
  Everyone look at this guy! He's got logic!
  - joshmlewis 14y ago
    I'm sorry for the above comment everyone. Reddit has infected my humor. I shouldn't have brought it here. :(
jmartens 14y ago
Azure has no shot at this market....none.
- pcj 14y ago
  Curious...why you say that?
  - donavanm 14y ago
    Azure, in general, is just burning money with no significant uptake. Friends who work there say there aren't even significant internal uses. Just based on that I'd be dubious of any new Azure service dominating their segment. Maybe they'll buy themselves another Xbox situation, but I don't see it yet.

justincormack 14y ago

Ah yes. Remember if you run services that compete with what Amazon might do you may have a problem. There are many businesses in this space running on AWS.

gklitt 14y ago

Does anyone with experience using Zencoder (http://zencoder.com/en/ http://zencoder.com/en/) see advantages/disadvantages of this new Amazon service compared to Zencoder, which has been around for a while? Zencoder is owned by Brightcove and I'm sure they will be fully capable of putting up a good fight, but I can't imagine this won't take a significant amount of business away from them...

zwily 14y ago
Surprisingly, Elastic Transcoder doesn't look to be very price competitive with Zencoder at scale. Zencoder is $0.02/minute, while this is $0.015 (stdef) and $0.030 (hidef). If you're doing hidef content, Zencoder is a clear (pricing) win. EDIT: Never mind... Zencoder charges double for hidef content too.
- d33pika 14y ago
  Zencoder charges double the normal rate for HD videos, so it is $0.04 for HD
d33pika 14y ago
AWS only supports MP4, zencoder supports a whole host of them,significant being TS files for HTTP Live streaming needed by IOS devices.
- cloudshoring 14y ago
  I transcoded it in to FLV and it worked www.cloudshoring.in
d33pika 14y ago
I am also curious about the how fast the AWS service will be. Zencoder is pretty fast. http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-10x-faster-than-the-competition/ http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/10/18/zencoder-benchmarked-2x-...
- 14y ago

garrynewman 14y ago

I love aws

chrisacky 14y ago

It's quite an interesting business decision to jump into this market. Take Zencoder for example (which is one of my favourite players in this field)... if you are to compare the prices with say Zencoder [1] AWS is much more cost effective (by several factors). Even if you were operating at scale and spending $2000 per month with Zencoder, you would only get 50,000minutes worth of HD Video. (You pay 2 minutes worth of credits for HD video on Zencoder). If you spend $2000 with AWS, you would be getting 33% more value. (Remember, this is operating at scale. The savings can be even larger)... and this is really the best case scenario for Zencoder. If you are "just getting started", the savings are immediate. On Zencoder it's $0.10 for HD video, compared to $0.03 on AWS. I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. [1] : http://zencoder.com/en/pricing

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
zimbatm 14y ago
Not really. Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market. Remember, they're playing for the long-run. Maybe they needed it to convert their videos on LoveFilm.com or maybe another future service connected with their Cloud Drive. What is also means is that if your company provides a service to other developers you might well be in competition with Amazon in the future. EDIT: Maybe I should mention that I work at PandaStream, another video transcoding service. We're still cheaper with 100% utilisation but our pricing model and target market isn't exactly the same.
- mikecane 14y ago
  >>>Amazon just builds what they need instead of depending on others and then sell it as a service to the larger market Yes. But I don't recall reading anywhere that Amazon would or even could offer this. It makes me wonder what else there is they will sell. Warehousing software? Shipping logistics? Anyone have a list?

hayksaakian 14y ago

Interesting. Are there any consumer facing apps using these services (aws transcode competitors/zencoder)? Could this be used to stream live video?

d33pika 14y ago
Zencoder recently came out with live transcoding. Its only a transcoding service, but I guess using brightcove you can stream live videos. AWS has only announced file base transcoding.

roel_v 14y ago

Only h264/AAC/mp4 output though. I wonder how well they handle embedded subtitle streams, too (I don't even know if they're supported at all for mp4). Seems OK for the most basic of web video streaming, but then again, I guess that's the majority of the use cases they're targeting. (more concretely, this doesn't look to be suitable for digitizing dvd collections).

ireland 14y ago

I'm sorry to say this but doesn't this mean the end for Zencoder, TransLoadIT and other video encoding services?

hisyam 14y ago
Using that logic, all the other cloud storage services would be out of business right now.
jqueryfan33 14y ago
Transloadit doesn't do video only, it does much more. Not sure about Zencoder and Pandastream.

borplk 14y ago

Damn pretty smart move. They place themselves in the 'lowest common denominator' of the industry. Whilst the smaller companies and startups compete and struggle to find the right combination of factors for their awesome video/web/cloud/storage/etc product at the end of the day they all need the same kind of thing to operate on and Amazon is often the cheapest option to start with and it serves the whole industry making little cents tick tick tick one after another...

Tekker 14y ago

The Porn industry just took a huge step forward. :)

level09 14y ago
Amazon doesn't allow porn content on its servers ..
- true_religion 14y ago
  I just checked their AUP, and it doesn't seem to say that [1]. This makes sense since AWS is pretty much a content agnostic system that you pay for by the hour and otherwise have no interaction with amazon staff. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/aup/ http://aws.amazon.com/aup/
donavanm 14y ago
Nah, porn companies are generally too cheap to use services like aws.

neotek 14y ago

How about audio transcoding? At my music startup we're building a transcoding backend that will take in FLAC, AIFF, or WAV and spit out MP3, FLAC, AAC, ALAC, and OGG files for people to download, and I'd kill for a transcoding service with a robust API that can deliver those formts.

donavanm 14y ago
Nope, video only. Audio is a logical step though. Go bug your friendly neighborhood rep/support person with a feature request.
cwh 14y ago
build it
- hartator 14y ago
  love that
- yoaviram 14y ago
  +1
- nmcfarl 14y ago
  No need to build it - Zencoder already does it. -- Edit: looks like they only support these audio codecs: aac, ac3, amr, eac3, mp3, vorbis, and wma https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/format-and-codecs/audio-codec https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/format-and-codecs...
  - jon_dahl 14y ago
    We've thought hard about Opus, FLAC, and ALAC. Don't be surprised if you see those soon...
jqueryfan33 14y ago
Check out http://transloadit.com http://transloadit.com

ericcholis 14y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix assisted in this.

pdknsk 14y ago

Why is the pricing tier so static? $0,030: 1920 x 1080 @ 62500 kbps ... 1280 x 720 @ 17500 kbps

dangravell 14y ago

Who's the market? Surely crappy upload speeds and download caps stop this being used by 'consumers'.

jeffbarr 14y ago

Here's my blog post with some additional info: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/01/amazon-elastic-transcoder.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/01/amazon-elastic-transcoder...

klinquist 14y ago

Why haven't they started pushing these jobs down to distributed clients? I'd love to run an Amazon Transcoding app on my PC and earn credit that I can spend toward other Amazon services.

EricBurnett 14y ago
1, privacy - they would have to send you a copy of someone's video for that. 2, I expect the end user bandwidth is worth more than the CPU time you'd provide, so the credits they could give wouldn't be worth it to you.
- klinquist 14y ago
  Well, there are ways around #1. It seems they could split a video up into enough chunks to make the bandwidth minimal for each party involved (it may not be worth it for /them/, however).
  - gosub 14y ago
    Or they could use homomorphic encryption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      Do you seriously think you can get any kind of reasonable compression using only operations that are data-independent?
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    Video encoding tends to rely heavily on previous frames so it's not trivial to split a video into small chunks for encoding and still get a good result.
wmf 14y ago
You might be insulted when you saw how little they could afford to pay you. The idle time on random PCs is worth less than the overhead cost of managing it.

WordSkill 14y ago

Amazon should complement this new transcoding service and their existing media streaming (via Cloudfront) with a full media server, along the lines of Red5 or Wowza or Adobe Media Server, that would allow you to do more advanced stuff, such as capturing video from users, hosting video chatrooms etc. You can already run Wowza instances on EC2 but the premium on top of standard AWS prices is too high, if this functionality can be commoditized there will be an explosion of innovative new uses.

gtCameron 14y ago
I agree. We have been trying to scale our Wowza on EC2 setup for live video streaming, but after looking at our options it was about the same price to just go with a VDN like Edgecast that managed the server complexity for us. If Amazon could support live streaming through Cloudfront I think they could undercut the existing VDNs on pricing and have a big opportunity in that market.

dagge 14y ago

Wow, that product page is just massive. It tires me so much just looking at it that I'd rather just browse along. I'd like to see what designers looking to build up their portfolio could do with the Amazon AWS products.

wpietri 14y ago
I think the problem may be your lack of interest. As somebody who has used AWS a fair bit, I love those massive pages. It's easy for me to jump around, and being able to use in-browser search to rummage through the whole thing is great.
jmartens 14y ago
In contrast, see http://gridvid.me http://gridvid.me

contingencies 14y ago

As someone who worked until a couple of years ago in this field, I should point out that the larger area of value in the industry is the capacity to customize content for the consumer scenario (available bandwidth, CPU, resolution, available buffer size, CODEC support, etc.) and to do so automatically. The notion of precomputing various versions of a piece of media is not a new one, nor a particularly valuable one, since consumers rarely know which option to select. What users really need is something that perfectly matches their viewing scenario and their device (largely mobile). The knowledge of what works well on each device (with default settings) is the real gem here, and the capacity to deliver it ASAP (eg. transcoding in real time) is the service to supply. There are far more codec options than you can shake a stick at, and they do affect playback quality - especially during higher and lower bitrate portions of the media, and especially on lower end mobile devices (essentially today's global internet access norm). While the standard tool in this area is ffmpeg, one should note that not all of its algorithms can be parallelized, so real time delivery is a thornier problem than you might expect. Also, while there are device databases that can tell you resolution from an HTTP User Agent string, none of these will tell you CODEC support and functional bitrate limitations. The manufacturers, hastily throwing together devices from third party chip SDKs, often don't know these specs themselves. Throw in subtitle stream rendering support and the corresponding font problems, and things get really fun really quickly. Good luck to anyone in this area, I for one am glad to have left!

jfb 14y ago
Only hard problems are worth solving. I for one find it a very interesting field to be working in.
- contingencies 14y ago
  I am glad to hear that you are interested in your work, as pleasure in work can be hard to find. Apologies for being in a philosophical mood: I contemplated not responding, and responding otherwise, but finally thought that offering this anecdote might be interesting. Please, take from it what you will. A Buddhist I know said that the thing that troubled them about the digital media field was how it conflicted with their great respect for some of the ideas that are central to that philosophy. They said that they identified much modern media consumption as intoxication of the mind with what may amount to trivial experiences tangential to achieving happiness and peace, which they viewed as quite apart from the endless sensory experiences of the world. (For a simple example, they pointed to Youtube) After some searching, this seems to be the reference: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma-ajivo/index.html http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma... A [lay person] should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison. Personally my friend's perspective did make me feel a little guilty about my work, since I am also (if sporadically) very interested in Buddhist philosophy and because encouraging people to spend their time "in earnest" (from a Buddhist perspective) is no doubt a personal failure as seen by the Buddhist teachings, in so far as I can grasp them myself. Yet, Buddhism also teaches that we should respect the treasure of conscience as a means to change our ways, and it is certainly true that communications of any kind can certainly be a bringer of good ... as well as thoughtless trivia.

yoda_sl 14y ago

It will not be surprising that in fact Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in fact what Netflix with Amazon's help may have work on in the past few years. Netflix is well known to use Amazon web services not only for the streaming part but even for doing all the movies encoding for all different devices they need to support. So I will not be surprise that it has now become a mature project that Amazon is now opening up, similar to the other service for S3 where you can ship your hard drive to upload directly on S3 without wasting bandwidth: from what I recall that service was in fact created initially for Netflix but later on open to third party.

juddlyon 14y ago

Zencoder has one of the nicest APIs I've ever used, it would take more than price for me to switch.

jbigelow76 14y ago
This needs more upvotes so it remains visible to all the people in at the top of the discussion who think Zencoder lives and dies on price alone.
gtaylor 14y ago
While this makes me (as a developer) happy, my customers don't care. They want encoding, they want it cheaper, and they want it better. I am still tinkering, but for our purposes, it looks like Amazon's Transcoding service is going to be cheaper and of good enough quality to get the nod over Zencoder.

brianbreslin 14y ago

Idea: build a pretty web based UI or software downloadable UI for this and mark up the costs to be just under zencoder's pricing. Would that be viable? for people who need 1 off transcoding they load up $20 of credits minimum or something. If someone wants to do it, I have a domain I've been sitting on which would be good for this.

aysar 14y ago
Precisely what I was thinking... I'm probably going to jump on to this... do a 2-4 week hack at it and launch it. If anyone wants to partner, let me know (I can design and play full stack- either one). Let me know what the domain is, I may be interested.
- brianbreslin 14y ago
  encloudit.com just have a dummy wordpress site on it.
- alttab 14y ago
  Be careful. You are playing the price game. Long term winning strategies don't start with undercutting.

brown9-2 14y ago

Pricing this per-video-minute seems pretty smart (not familiar with the space so I'm not sure if this is how it is generally done). As their CPUs get faster, they can transcode the same video for the same price for less cost to Amazon.

jmartens 14y ago
Pretty standard way to price....Zencoder pioneered it a few years ago.

Hupo 14y ago

The thing that annoys me about both this and Zencoder is that for people who are actually experienced with video encoding, there is absolutely no way to tweak eg. the underlying x264 settings. There's quite a few settings that have no effect on decoding in any way but are pretty important in getting the most out of the video at a given bitrate (most notably the strength/mode of AQ and psychovisual optimizations). In case of AWS, there doesn't even seem to be any kind of "general" tuning (like whether the content is film, animation, extremely grainy or so - x264 has --tune settings for these among others - Zencoder at least allows you to access this option[1]) options available, making it pretty much "one size fits all". I could always rent a generic server and use that for my encoding needs, but it'd be much more convenient if these cloud transcoding services simply offered advanced configuration for people who know what they are doing. Also, even for a "simple" cloud transcoding service, Amazon's offering is pretty limited in what it can do right now[2] - you can basically only encode H.264 & AAC in MP4, define the profile, level and bitrate, and that's about it. Zencoder has much more options in comparison and has generally more transparency in regards to what their encoding software actually does (sadly when I asked them about getting access to x264 settings directly, they replied along the lines of "they could change and things might break for users!" - which I don't think would be an actual issue since the direct settings ought to be for advanced users only, and they should be aware of things changing - plus Zencoder could just notify users of direct settings before they upgrade so they have time to adjust their settings if necessary). [1] https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/h264/tuning https://app.zencoder.com/docs/api/encoding/h264/tuning [2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/developerguide/preset-settings.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/develope...

jeffbarr 14y ago
As is the case with every part of AWS, we add additional features and options over time based on customer feedback and requests. Please feel free to let us (or me -- jbarr@amazon.com) know what you need and I'll bring it to the team's attention within 30 minutes.
- Hupo 14y ago
  Sent a mail your way with more detailed impressions and thoughts.

potta 14y ago

While Amazon's service has a price advantage, there are some differences that could justify Zencoder's premium for some customers. Amazon gives you a maximum of 4 encoding pipelines. These operate like queues. If you are processing many jobs simultaneously, and encoding multiple versions of each video, then those queues could start to build up. With Zencoder, all your jobs are processed in parallel, no matter how much you throw at it. In my experience, queue times with Zencoder have averaged <10 seconds. For batch jobs, that aren't sensitive to encoding times Amazon's queues shouldn't be a problem (ex - a media company encoding a huge library into a bunch of different formats). Business video services or online video platforms may want to optimize around keeping queue times low to get client videos out quickly. Zencoder also seems to be working on premium services like closed captioning (an FCC rule says that programming that is shown on TV must have closed captioning when it is shown on the web), live streaming, and packaging HLS streams. Finally, Zencoder supports formats like ProRes 422, that Amazon may not (I haven't seen a list of input formats yet). Zencoder also has great support and a great API. I'm a Zencoder customer and don't have any vested interest in the company. In fact, I'll be taking a look at the service to see if it meets our needs. I just wanted to highlight that if you are making a decision around transcoding, you need to define your requirements, understand the trade offs, and test the different options.

jmartens 14y ago

great news for customers....

jmartens 14y ago

The most interesting part of this move is what it says about their relations with EC2 customers. Most cloud encoders that ET will compte with, run on EC2.

mikey_p 14y ago

Am I reading this right, in that there is no support for WebM/VP8? If so, I'm a bit confused as to who this product is supposed to be for, it seems not suitable for generic web video. Is this intended to be for mobile only?

ketralnis 14y ago

Wow, they really are tailoring their service for Netflix specifically these days.

jmartens 14y ago
no way Netflix would use this service...they'll stick with EC2 and do their own encoding.

edgesrazor 14y ago

We're using Encoding.com right now which works off the AWS infrastructure. We pre-paid and got our pricing down to $0.018 per megabyte. The drawback to this method is that encoding charges you for MB in AND MB out, whereas Amazon and Zencoder are charging just by the minute of output. I'm pretty happy with Encoding.com but after running some test files through AWS, I have to seriously consider switching - AWS seems much faster (not a controlled test, more is needed) and in our case it's much easier to predict costs by going with a per minute model than a per MB in/out. An added bonus - boto already has support for it.

edgesrazor 14y ago
EDIT: I made one of my typical decimal blunders - we are paying $0.0018 per megabyte. Big difference.

ersii 14y ago

Hm, I havn't used Amazons Web Services earlier - since most of their services looks to be priced in a good range, when suddenly you read the fine print about the bandwidth charges. I've been trying to read through about Amazon Elastic Transcoder (AET?)'s pricing - but I can't figure out the total. I assume you need to pay to get the video out of S3? Do you have to pay on the way in, as well? What would it cost to encode a 20 minute HD video that's like, 500MB?

d33pika 14y ago
Data transfer in to S3 is free. First 1GB/month transfer out is free,after that it is 0.12GB for the next 10TB. These rates would apply if you store your video on S3 and use another service like zencoder too. The transfer between EC2 and S3 in same region is free though.
- ersii 14y ago
  Ah, alrighty. Thanks!

shn 14y ago

Could this be a trend for Amazon that they'll expand vertically? If that is the case they'll be competing with their customers eventually.