Amazon has carved out a nice little niche with their S3 and CloudFront services, allowing individuals and small businesses to deliver videos on the Internet just like the big boys, but without the hefty price tags. And now they are rumored to be developing another part of the web video equation; getting videos in the proper format for the web in the first place.
It’s said that they’ve recently purchased a number of video encoding servers…servers that utilize GPU’s instead of CPU’s…which can mean significantly faster video encoding times. The thought is they’ll use these servers to offer pay-for-what-you-use, on-demand, video encoding services for everyone.
Skeptics…while acknowledging that Amazon is interested in the video encoding market…aren’t so sure they’ll offer video encoding services “for everyone”. That’s because they’d be competing against their own customers. You see, some of the largest cloud-based video encoding services use Amazon servers/services to power their operations. So the skeptics believe that Amazon may simply offer their souped-up encoding servers to businesses…rather than actually offering an encoding service.
Whatever the case, we’ll all likely enjoy faster video encoding times in the future.