Sorry, but I can't help but feel that it wouldn't be that difficult to get similar performance by setting up a free AMI for people to do exactly this sort of thing using their own EC2 instance. What kind of value does zencoder actually add vs. running an ec2 instance with ffmpeg handling the transcoding?
That doesn't really answer my question (and I am a potential customer). How exactly does zencoder add value to justify their additional costs? Converting video with ffmpeg is trivial in my experience. What exactly does zencoder do that's better than anyone else? Has zencoder actually extended ffmpeg in a deeply meaningful way--e.g. modified the codebase to handle new codecs, new containers, or transcode much, much faster than a basic ffmpeg install? The website is not particularly helpful in that regard and strikes me as a bunch of smoke and mirrors surrounding a pedestrian ffmpeg implementation running in the "cloud."
In my experience it is far more efficient to transcode very high resolution files (4k or even 1080p) locally, and then upload a real deliverable (at much greater speed now that it has been compressed).
As a short answer, though, we're actually quite cheap for most customers. Major internet publishers use Zencoder for a few hundred dollars/month. Large-volume providers use us for less than the cost of a full-time engineer - and the alternative to Zencoder at large scale is a team, not a single engineer. Mission-critical encoding requires a lot of engineering and operations, even when starting from the excellent open-source libraries available.
Beyond that, we generally do things faster, more reliably, and at higher quality than "default" encoding systems, especially around the edges. That's what happens when you throw >10,000 hours of engineering at this problem. Again, get in touch if you want specifics.
Just to compare/contrast, we do more video/minute at Zencoder than the iTunes video ingest system could handle, with many fewer engineers, a far smaller budget, and a much broader set of capabilities.
To a certain extent, this is an apples and oranges comparison, but the service model really seems to fit precisely with video encoding (or I wouldn't be here).
