Our pricing decreases as volume increases, so at a higher level, an hour of video is currently $1.68, not $3.60. At scale, we have other options we can offer (like dedicated servers at a fixed monthly price). We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course. :)
> We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course.
Speaking as a company that reluctantly made a decision to offer this for our customers when we couldn't find (a few years ago) an affordable volume solution to outsource, I agree with you completely.
Given the rate of change and state of tools, running even an in-house encoding solution is likely to be a much bigger undertaking than expected.
In-house IT staff would need to understand distributed computing, dynamic load based provisioning, web services software development, and somehow, blended with that, the black art of producing good looking video at low bitrates using minimal CPU time. Any one of these areas is a full discipline on its own.
If I understand correctly, Posterous got funding, and is pushing this part out the door to Zencoder. That's a smart decision. Focus on what you do.
The video industry needs more Zencoders and fewer people trying to do it in house. There are still far more backlogs of unencoded video than there are movies online.
The API is just http + json, so it works with any language. But we also hope to have an open source Python integration library very soon. (Anyone want to help us with that?) :)
