Encoding.com Case Study

Encoding.com makes video transcoding into all popular formats easy, cost-effective, and instantly scalable for global enterprises and small / medium businesses (SMBs) including video sites, agencies and web development platforms. Encoding.com offers performance-based service-level agreements that ensure it can manage all high-volume video transcoding requirements. Based in San Francisco, CA, Encoding.com was an Amazon Startup Challenge Finalist in 2008

The Encoding.com team uses the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform for a wide range of operations. For all video processing, the Encoding.com team uses Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for temporary video storage and encoding platform instance backups. Encoding.com also uses the AWS Import/Export service for customers with massive video-encoding jobs that would take too long to transfer via the public Internet. And Encoding.com is pioneering and evangelizing “cloud video” as a cost-effective and flexible video workflow to replace expensive online video platform providers and in-house infrastructure through Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront.

The Encoding.com team pioneered video encoding Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with a usage-based billing model and provides customers with instant and unlimited scalability, freeing them from the challenges of scaling unpredictable encoding infrastructure. “This model would not have been possible without the elastic capacity features provided by the AWS platform,” says Gregg Heil, founder/CEO of Encoding.com.

Encoding.com launched in September, 2008, with a platform built using Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) architecture and running 100% of all media processing on Amazon EC2, with physical servers for API management services.

Since launch, the Encoding.com team has processed over eight million media files through AWS. Encoding.com traffic peaks at about 600 simultaneous Amazon EC2 instances, processing large and small video jobs in parallel, and averages about 100 instances 24/7 to process approximately 40,000 files per day.

Currently, through AWS, Encoding.com helps over a thousand business customers across many verticals such as media and entertainment, online education, user-generated content, mobile applications and marketing more efficiently produce videos for popular Web and mobile devices, while reducing in-house CAPEX and headcount requirements.

As the Encoding.com team expands into new video-encoding services such as quality assurance, broadcast formats, and delivery, they are looking to Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront to accelerate their time to market.

“The most impressive aspect to our two years deployed on AWS has been the platform stability,” says Heil. “Because of its elastic capacity, platform maturity, and straightforward technical documentation, AWS has enabled Encoding.com to pioneer a new Software-as-a-Service approach to high-volume video encoding.”