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Cloud vid wrangler Zencoder STRADDLES Amazon and Google

Transcoding biz opens up for buy-curious punters

Cloud video encoder Zencoder has taken a deep breath and gingerly straddled two cloud providers in an attempt to offer customers greater infrastructure choice.

The Brightcove-owned firm announced support for Google's just-released Google Compute Engine on Monday, giving Chocolate Factory aficionados access to a new infrastructure-coupled transcoding service, and Amazon-committed customers the option of choice.

Coincidentally, the move follows Amazon's continued aggressive development of its own Amazon Web Services-based transcoding service, though Zencoder tells us its Google-hug should be viewed as an additional service, rather than a sign of the company moving off AWS.

It also says that some customers may want to partake in different hosted variants of its service for different reasons, due to the different capabilities of the platforms.

"Amazon has a wider range of instance sizes, including high CPU instances with more cores than Google's largest instances," ZenCoder co-founder Jon Dahl tolds us. "We've been consistently impressed with the network performance and boot times of GCE instances."

Customers keen on the tech can now pair Google Compute Engine instances with Google Cloud Storage, allowing them to use the Chocolate Factory's capable networking tech to cut the time to process video. Example code is available on the company's website.

But do customers care about cloud choice this much? "The demand ranges widely," Dahl said. Some customers were "actively asking" for the tech, and others wanted a choice of providers – but many don't really mind.

"Honestly, the vast majority of customer's don't care; they just want Zencoder to perform with high speed and high availability," he said. ®

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