Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Amazon Web Services, Inc. today announced Amazon Elastic Transcoder, a highly scalable service for transcoding video files between different digital media formats. For example, customers can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to convert their large high resolution "master" video files into smaller versions that are optimized for playback on websites, mobile devices, connected TV's and other video platforms. Amazon Elastic Transcoder removes the need to manage infrastructure and transcoding software, providing scalability and performance by leveraging AWS services. The service manages all aspects of the transcoding process transparently and automatically. It also supports pre-defined transcoding presets that make it easy to transcode video for smartphones, tablets, web browsers and other devices. With Amazon Elastic Transcoder, customers can create enterprise, training, user-generated, broadcast, or other video content for their applications or websites. Customers can get started with Amazon Elastic Transcoder by visiting http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder.

Traditionally, transcoding has been complex for customers in three significant ways. First, customers need to buy and manage transcoding software, which can be expensive and also requires substantial configuration and management. Second, audio and video settings for each device that the customer wants to support need to be created and tested. Often, this is a trial and error process, which can be wasteful as compute resources are used each time a new combination of settings is tried. Third, to accommodate peak workloads, customers need to provision the transcoding capacity appropriately. This can be expensive because most of the time the capacity is underutilized.

With Amazon Elastic Transcoder these complexities are eliminated. There is no need to buy, configure or manage the underlying transcoding software. In addition, Amazon Elastic Transcoder provides pre-defined presets for popular devices that remove the trial and error in finding the right settings and output formats for different devices. The service also supports custom presets (pre-defined settings made by the customer), making it easy for customers to create re-useable transcoding settings for their unique requirements such as a specific video size or bitrate. Finally, Amazon Elastic Transcoder automatically scales up and down to handle customers' workloads, eliminating wasted capacity and minimizing time spent waiting for jobs to complete. The service also enables customers to process multiple files in parallel and organize their transcoding workflow using a feature called transcoding pipelines. Using transcoding pipelines, customers can configure Amazon Elastic Transcoder to transcode their files when and how they want, so they can efficiently and seamlessly scale for spikey workloads. For example, a news organization may want to have a "high priority" transcoding pipeline for breaking news stories, or a User-Generated Content website may want to have separate pipelines for low, medium, and high resolution outputs to target different devices.

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