To your point, perhaps flat rate encoding pricing is better for high volumes.
Our flat rate transcoding pricing (http://www.advection.net/pricing/transcoding-pricing) is based on the idea of an encoding queue with bursting. Under the hood, it's a similar cloud approach, but more economical for those with volumes or steady encoding work. Customers--or their end users--can upload at any rate (volumes of upload sessions at once through gateways located around the country for low latency), or ship drives. The queues process at a steady predictable rate, delivering content directly to the network.
In the course of processing countless libraries for clients, we've found they tend to have such unique ideas about the end result that a "one size fits all" web service often doesn't meet their needs out of the box.
So, we also offer Windows Media (WMV), Silverlight (VC-1), Ogg Theora, and cross-player H.264 encoding, adaptive bitrate encoding for Apple devices, iPhone video rotation, automatic thumbnails, web postbacks so you don't have to poll, incoming files of up to 4.7GB in size, and arbitrarily complex encoding requirements.
To your point about images + sound, for example, some clients supply metadata as XML, and using the metadata we generate pre-roll and post-roll video footage that stitches onto the transcoded video.
(We also have a consumer service that bundles both encoding and storage into a single "per minute" price. Consumers shouldn't need to know about gigabytes.)
Our flat rate transcoding pricing (http://www.advection.net/pricing/transcoding-pricing) is based on the idea of an encoding queue with bursting. Under the hood, it's a similar cloud approach, but more economical for those with volumes or steady encoding work. Customers--or their end users--can upload at any rate (volumes of upload sessions at once through gateways located around the country for low latency), or ship drives. The queues process at a steady predictable rate, delivering content directly to the network.
In the course of processing countless libraries for clients, we've found they tend to have such unique ideas about the end result that a "one size fits all" web service often doesn't meet their needs out of the box.
So, we also offer Windows Media (WMV), Silverlight (VC-1), Ogg Theora, and cross-player H.264 encoding, adaptive bitrate encoding for Apple devices, iPhone video rotation, automatic thumbnails, web postbacks so you don't have to poll, incoming files of up to 4.7GB in size, and arbitrarily complex encoding requirements.
To your point about images + sound, for example, some clients supply metadata as XML, and using the metadata we generate pre-roll and post-roll video footage that stitches onto the transcoded video.
(We also have a consumer service that bundles both encoding and storage into a single "per minute" price. Consumers shouldn't need to know about gigabytes.)