6 ms·

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

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
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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?
  - zimbatm 14y ago
    Everything that counts are infrastructure. If you're providing a service that other developers build on you're going to compete with Amazon in the future.
    - infinite8s 14y ago
      Not only developers. They are also upending all intermediary businesses between manufacturers and consumers (inventory, shipping, etc).
  - ProblemFactory 14y ago
    Amazon already offers warehousing and shipping as a service, even if you don't sell your products on Amazon: https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/180-3112035-8326220?ie=UTF8&section=inbound&group=fba&version=latest https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/180-311... You ship them a pallet of stuff, and then use a web API to ask items to be delivered to addresses.
    - DoubleCluster 14y ago
      Oh, they really have an API for everything. That's awesome. Now... I wonder if there are companies in China that have an API to order a pallet of stuff?
  - eric-hu 14y ago
    Re: could Amazon has offered streaming video for years now. This is just a guess on my part, but they probably don't receive video from studios in a stream-friendly format. Their streaming format has also likely been updated over the years.
  - barkingcat 14y ago
    This is a strange question - Amazon can offer anything that can be thought of by the human mind and can be shown to make some money. It's a competitive world. I'd fully expect Amazon to do anything and everything their staff can come up with. Perhaps in a few years when the space industry takes off maybe even run a space / orbital freight service. It makes sense for them.
newhouseb 14y ago
Looking at the fact that you can do encoding across a lot of different regions seems to me to indicate that there isn't any special capabilities required for Amazon to implement this other than just a custom AMI. If I had to guess, this is all part of a strategy to figure out ways to utilize their idle fleet. Spot instances are often used for these sorts of batch offline compute-intensive jobs, but if you're a third party you are hostage to the market dynamics (changing prices of spot instances). Since Amazon owns the market, they can just take capacity out of the fleet of available as spot instances instantaneously for free and be immune to pricing changes in the spot-instance market - something no competitor could ever do. So if you were to ask - what is a common batch-style workload that requires a lot of computing power that a lot of people need who would otherwise not be using our spot instances and that can consume our idle capacity? I can't think of a better market than video encoding. This is certainly scary for companies like Zencoder, and feels somewhat anticompetitive (IANAL so speaking practically rather than legally), but it makes otherwise good sense as a business strategy.
- stanleydrew 14y ago
  I'm not sure how it's anti-competitive, unless in six months Amazon tries to shut down Zencoder's or some other competitor's Amazon account, which I can't really see happening.
  - newhouseb 14y ago
    It's more implicit due to the underlying economics than explicitly so. As long as Zencoder runs on AWS, barring some magic encoding technology, it can never be cheaper than Amazon could theoretically go. This assumes that transcoding services are competitive primarily along price (which may be an incorrect assumption - I'm not in the business). The bottom limit of the price Amazon can charge is a function of their dominant (but admittedly not monopolistic) position in the cloud computing market.
    - kcg 14y ago
      That's not anticompetitive though, it's purely competitive. Amazon has better underlying economics (because it has deployed capital to build infrastructure) and therefore is able to offer the same service at a lower price.
jpdoctor 14y ago
> There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. Yep, they put a potential competitor into their critical path. The business lesson is: Don't do that. Nothin personal, jus business.
- bjustin 14y ago
  A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?
  - untog 14y ago
    If you'd asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have expected Amazon to provide a CDN. Or a DNS server. Or a giant MySQL instance in the sky. I think the general lesson here is that if it is a server-based operation that can be made more cost effective in bulk, Amazon are interested in doing it.
    - jpdoctor 14y ago
      > that can be made more cost effective in bulk I assume the Heroku guys have noticed by now. Hopefully they're working on designing Amazon out.
      - untog 14y ago
        It is interesting that Amazon never seem to go down the acquisition route- if they did, Heroku could be a target. I really want someone to make an RDS-like service for Postgres. But I don't blame people for not trying right now, I'm sure Amazon will do it eventually.
        shalmanese 14y ago
        Amazon bought Zappos and Kiva
dalke 14y ago
"I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step?" This happens. Look at the operating systems companies. Apple introduced iTunes or Time Machine, and the sales of third-party music players and backup systems goes down. Microsoft includes a web-browser and the sales of third-party browsers goes down, or to go back 20 years, MS introduces DoubleSpace and sales of Stacker go down. It can be a balancing act. If Amazon starts picking off the businesses of its most profitable cloud customers then there will be an uproar. If Amazon sticks with the features which make it a better cloud provider, then it's more to be expected. This fits into the latter. Hopefully the video encoding companies that operate on AWS already have considered this possibility.
wmf 14y ago
OTOH, Amazon's service looks like the most basic possible transcoder. At this point many competitors have moved on to offering full-fledged video CDNs with more sophisticated features.
zitterbewegung 14y ago
Does this mean we will see Zencoder and all of the other competitors in the cloud transcoding space start to lower their prices to match amazon?
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  Or even Microsoft's Azure. They officially announced their entrance into the encoding game about a week ago. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/media/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/media/ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/01/22/announcing-release-of-windows-azure-media-services.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/01/22/announcing...
- Goopplesoft 14y ago
  Welcome to markets & capitalism.
jon_dahl 14y ago
Zencoder here. Amazon has done a good job of making their pricing look simpler/cheaper than ours, and for some customers, it is. Two quick comments. 1. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already. 2. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value. We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.
- jpdoctor 14y ago
  > and we aren't worried. So are you working on designing them out? Or are you counting on them never giving your AWS account short shrift?
  - wpietri 14y ago
    I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust. Trust is the biggest factor in a platform decision, and they'd be foolish to put all their other business at risk for a temporary advantage in one small slice. Especially since they are still making money on every Zencoder job.
    - jpdoctor 14y ago
      > I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. Really? One example: When states threatened sales tax (before CA), they cut off retailers in those states. They can and they have given people short shrift when it's in their business interest. To be fair, that just means they know how to increase sales by selecting who gets thrown to the lions, which is necessary in any business.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        Sorry, I am speaking specifically of the AWS business. I think most people making platform selections are mainly focused on AWS. I'm sure they pay some attention now to Amazon proper, but their affiliate programs were a peripheral thing, and
wpietri 14y ago
> I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? I'm not so sure I'd be worried. Amazon has certain advantages in the market. But they are not into handholding at all. I think you can easily out-compete them on ease of use, support, and community. You can also do much better marketing, and make much more interesting partnerships. I also think Amazon's massive scale constrains them some; they can't be as flexible. In Zencoder's shoes, I'd be looking to see if I could get a pricing advantage through specialized hardware that covers my base computing load. I've see people drop their AWS bills by a factor of 10 when a good sysadmin designs a workload-specific setup.

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?
- zimbatm 14y ago
  Everything that counts are infrastructure. If you're providing a service that other developers build on you're going to compete with Amazon in the future.
  - infinite8s 14y ago
    Not only developers. They are also upending all intermediary businesses between manufacturers and consumers (inventory, shipping, etc).
- ProblemFactory 14y ago
  Amazon already offers warehousing and shipping as a service, even if you don't sell your products on Amazon: https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/180-3112035-8326220?ie=UTF8&section=inbound&group=fba&version=latest https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/180-311... You ship them a pallet of stuff, and then use a web API to ask items to be delivered to addresses.
  - DoubleCluster 14y ago
    Oh, they really have an API for everything. That's awesome. Now... I wonder if there are companies in China that have an API to order a pallet of stuff?
- eric-hu 14y ago
  Re: could Amazon has offered streaming video for years now. This is just a guess on my part, but they probably don't receive video from studios in a stream-friendly format. Their streaming format has also likely been updated over the years.
- barkingcat 14y ago
  This is a strange question - Amazon can offer anything that can be thought of by the human mind and can be shown to make some money. It's a competitive world. I'd fully expect Amazon to do anything and everything their staff can come up with. Perhaps in a few years when the space industry takes off maybe even run a space / orbital freight service. It makes sense for them.

newhouseb 14y ago

Looking at the fact that you can do encoding across a lot of different regions seems to me to indicate that there isn't any special capabilities required for Amazon to implement this other than just a custom AMI. If I had to guess, this is all part of a strategy to figure out ways to utilize their idle fleet. Spot instances are often used for these sorts of batch offline compute-intensive jobs, but if you're a third party you are hostage to the market dynamics (changing prices of spot instances). Since Amazon owns the market, they can just take capacity out of the fleet of available as spot instances instantaneously for free and be immune to pricing changes in the spot-instance market - something no competitor could ever do. So if you were to ask - what is a common batch-style workload that requires a lot of computing power that a lot of people need who would otherwise not be using our spot instances and that can consume our idle capacity? I can't think of a better market than video encoding. This is certainly scary for companies like Zencoder, and feels somewhat anticompetitive (IANAL so speaking practically rather than legally), but it makes otherwise good sense as a business strategy.

stanleydrew 14y ago
I'm not sure how it's anti-competitive, unless in six months Amazon tries to shut down Zencoder's or some other competitor's Amazon account, which I can't really see happening.
- newhouseb 14y ago
  It's more implicit due to the underlying economics than explicitly so. As long as Zencoder runs on AWS, barring some magic encoding technology, it can never be cheaper than Amazon could theoretically go. This assumes that transcoding services are competitive primarily along price (which may be an incorrect assumption - I'm not in the business). The bottom limit of the price Amazon can charge is a function of their dominant (but admittedly not monopolistic) position in the cloud computing market.
  - kcg 14y ago
    That's not anticompetitive though, it's purely competitive. Amazon has better underlying economics (because it has deployed capital to build infrastructure) and therefore is able to offer the same service at a lower price.

jpdoctor 14y ago

> There are several video encoding companies that operate on AWS already, and they all just got sandbagged. Yep, they put a potential competitor into their critical path. The business lesson is: Don't do that. Nothin personal, jus business.

bjustin 14y ago
A potential competitor, yes, but who expected Amazon to offer a video transcoding service? I certainly did not. Do you think that offering any compute-based service using Amazon's infrastructure is a bad business decision?
- untog 14y ago
  If you'd asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have expected Amazon to provide a CDN. Or a DNS server. Or a giant MySQL instance in the sky. I think the general lesson here is that if it is a server-based operation that can be made more cost effective in bulk, Amazon are interested in doing it.
  - jpdoctor 14y ago
    > that can be made more cost effective in bulk I assume the Heroku guys have noticed by now. Hopefully they're working on designing Amazon out.
    - untog 14y ago
      It is interesting that Amazon never seem to go down the acquisition route- if they did, Heroku could be a target. I really want someone to make an RDS-like service for Postgres. But I don't blame people for not trying right now, I'm sure Amazon will do it eventually.
      - shalmanese 14y ago
        Amazon bought Zappos and Kiva

dalke 14y ago

"I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step?" This happens. Look at the operating systems companies. Apple introduced iTunes or Time Machine, and the sales of third-party music players and backup systems goes down. Microsoft includes a web-browser and the sales of third-party browsers goes down, or to go back 20 years, MS introduces DoubleSpace and sales of Stacker go down. It can be a balancing act. If Amazon starts picking off the businesses of its most profitable cloud customers then there will be an uproar. If Amazon sticks with the features which make it a better cloud provider, then it's more to be expected. This fits into the latter. Hopefully the video encoding companies that operate on AWS already have considered this possibility.

wmf 14y ago

OTOH, Amazon's service looks like the most basic possible transcoder. At this point many competitors have moved on to offering full-fledged video CDNs with more sophisticated features.

zitterbewegung 14y ago

Does this mean we will see Zencoder and all of the other competitors in the cloud transcoding space start to lower their prices to match amazon?

jbigelow76 14y ago
Or even Microsoft's Azure. They officially announced their entrance into the encoding game about a week ago. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/media/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/media/ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/01/22/announcing-release-of-windows-azure-media-services.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/01/22/announcing...
Goopplesoft 14y ago
Welcome to markets & capitalism.

jon_dahl 14y ago

Zencoder here. Amazon has done a good job of making their pricing look simpler/cheaper than ours, and for some customers, it is. Two quick comments. 1. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already. 2. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value. We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.

jpdoctor 14y ago
> and we aren't worried. So are you working on designing them out? Or are you counting on them never giving your AWS account short shrift?
- wpietri 14y ago
  I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. The only reason they're the leading computing platform is trust. Trust is the biggest factor in a platform decision, and they'd be foolish to put all their other business at risk for a temporary advantage in one small slice. Especially since they are still making money on every Zencoder job.
  - jpdoctor 14y ago
    > I think Amazon is smart enough to know that they can't give anybody short shrift. Really? One example: When states threatened sales tax (before CA), they cut off retailers in those states. They can and they have given people short shrift when it's in their business interest. To be fair, that just means they know how to increase sales by selecting who gets thrown to the lions, which is necessary in any business.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      Sorry, I am speaking specifically of the AWS business. I think most people making platform selections are mainly focused on AWS. I'm sure they pay some attention now to Amazon proper, but their affiliate programs were a peripheral thing, and

wpietri 14y ago

> I'd be really worried and slightly confused by Amazon took this step? I'm not so sure I'd be worried. Amazon has certain advantages in the market. But they are not into handholding at all. I think you can easily out-compete them on ease of use, support, and community. You can also do much better marketing, and make much more interesting partnerships. I also think Amazon's massive scale constrains them some; they can't be as flexible. In Zencoder's shoes, I'd be looking to see if I could get a pricing advantage through specialized hardware that covers my base computing load. I've see people drop their AWS bills by a factor of 10 when a good sysadmin designs a workload-specific setup.