Coconut is Amazon Elastic Transcoder’s main competitor
Amazon Elastic Transcoder converts media in the cloud. It is designed for ease of use, providing a highly scalable and cost-effective service for businesses and developers to transcode, or convert, media files from their original source formats into formats that can be played on all major consumer playback devices.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder History
The initial public beta of Amazon Elastic Transcoder was released in early 2013.
It was developed to simplify the process of encoding an audio or video file from one format, quality, or size to another. Where developers and businesses previously had to go through the lengthy, and often costly, process of using open source and/or commercial code, dealing with scalability and storage issues, and implementing a workload management system, Amazon Elastic Transcoder was designed to make it easy.
With no sign-up costs, prices are worked out by the duration and quality of the transcoded videos. Once media files are stored in Amazon Storage Services, High Definition (HD) videos can be transcoded for USD $.030 a minute. There are no minimums or monthly commitments. Additionally, a user’s first 20 minutes of transcoding SD video or 10 minutes of transcoding HD video are provided free of charge, as part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Free Usage Tier.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder Competitors
Coconut is one of Amazon Elastic Transcoder’s main competitors. Built exclusively for developers, it offers a wide range of competitive features:
- - More than 50% cheaper offering only USD $0.015 per minute for HD outputs
- - Unlimited free tests thanks to FREE plan environment
- - Unlimited transcoding pipelines to give queue times of less than 1 second
- - Unlimited API Calls
- - Highly scalable with no limits on file size
- - Simultaneous encoding jobs and downloads
- - Super-fast transcoding, up to 10x faster than competitors
- - 99.9% application uptime
- - Fast and easy exportation to any CDN - Amazon S3, Azure, Any FTPS, etc.
- - Provides best HLS and MPEG-DASH video quality no matter the connection
- - Video previews that include static thumbnails, animated GIF, and storyboard options
Coconut's model has proven successful thanks to several advantages it holds over competitors in cloud encoding, including Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Dedicated to customer service and development from its very beginnings, Coconut’s founders started the company knowing that many startups are largely based on their founders’ dreams and ideas, and not the facts. While startups primarily aim to disrupt whatever industry they’re in, they often struggle to compete against established companies that roll out products based on proven business models. Prior to writing even one line of code, Coconut conducted extensive market research by reaching out to potential customers to determine their exact needs in a transcoding service.
When designing Coconut, developers placed the most emphasis on customer satisfaction. By making sure the user experience was easy, exciting, and error-free, they knew they would find success in the competitive cloud-based transcoding industry. Their plan involved two steps - first, they would focus on making the Coconut service the best it could possibly be. By improving video and audio quality to the point of maximum resolution, they could stand by the product with complete confidence. They also increased Coconut's processing speed, making it super fast and reliable when taking on a variety of audio or video file sizes and formats. Their second step was providing unparalleled customer support. By placing one of Coconut's own engineers within the support staff, they were uniquely qualified to respond to any inquiries a customer may have. Coconut's dedicated 24/7 phone and email support staff is available to respond to all customer comment and questions within minutes, unlike the support services of many of its competitors. Its many happy customers include tumblr, Adobe, Coca-Cola, Sony, McDonald's, and Yahoo.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder In A Nutshell
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a popular cloud-based video and audio transcoder that has found much of its success in its seamless integration with AWS. It has been marketed largely for its ease of use, targeting a huge demographic of developers and businesses who may have previously found the process of encoding video and audio files to be tedious and expensive. It is designed to be highly scalable and cost-effective, allowing users to transcode files uploaded to AWS into formats that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs.