How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market

&#62; Early on, we decided to focus on selling to engineers.<p>This shows in their documentation. I am working with their API, and everything is very well documented.<p>This also shows in their support. Being able to jump into a Campfire room with the same people who commit to their github repos makes for quickly resolved issues.<p>Keep up the good work Zencoder!

Switching to Zencoder was the best decision my company made to handle video uploads. They seriously are the best, by far. They even support full HD and audio only, and there are just a few file formats they don't yet support (like GoToMeeting).<p>If you need video encoding, use Zencoder. Don't even try to figure out your own ffmpeg or related solution, it's not worth the effort.

I absolutely love Zencoder! Highly recommended.<p>I wanted to encourage our customers to upload screencast style video demos of their apps to be presented within a product shot of an iPhone or iPad on their website (e.g. <a href="http://aeirtalk.com/" rel="nofollow">http://aeirtalk.com/</a> and <a href="http://homemarks.limelightapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://homemarks.limelightapp.com/</a>). In order to present the videos using HTML 5, it turned out we must encode the videos into three different formats (H.264, Ogg Theora, WebM.) Zencoder's API request builder made this a total breeze! I don't think I ever read the API documentation. Furthermore, I never have to worry about what format our customers are uploading.<p>We don't do a ton of video encoding, so our bill is never more than a few bucks a month. It's better than free when you consider how much time we didn't waste maintaining a server with ffmpeg on it. :)

One feature Zencoder still doesn't have (AFAIK?) that I find invaluable is allowing users to upload directly to the encoding service, bypassing your server entirely.<p>Thankfully, Transloadit (no, not affiliated, just a happy customer) does offer that service- it means that we don't have to worry about handling user uploads as well as not worrying about video encoding.

Zencoder looks good. I'm curious on how their billing process works, or how billing works for PaaS. Does customer prepay to buy credit or do they invoice a customer monthly?

Any estimate as to the time of transcoded content? Also, does the term "video" mean # movies in, or # of streams (movie at certain bitrate/width/etc) out?

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.

Oh is that what it is. I'd seen the name but imagined it was to do with Buddhism influenced programming or something.

Not to be harsh, but how many other transcoding services are there? I can think of none.