Hello, I'm the writer of the article. Our solution gets videos from random people who present products we sent them. We get dodgy videos filmed on bad devices, and the process of contacting the user and getting him to re-upload another video in better quality is time-consuming for our team. We'd rather spend a little bit more in computing to try and save time overall. I hope this answers your question.

I wonder if it wouldn't be cheaper to run an on-prem farm of BestBuy-grade "gamer PC" for smaller scale networks like that.

Twitch used to use cheap cores with Intel quicksync and maybe still does

Ive used xilinx a fair bit for encoding. once you get past the pain of compiling your tooling for it it does speed up VOD encode significantly.

How’s the quality? I heard it was so-so and i think you can’t close your own presets

For what I have down (2k and down, main) the quality has been OK. I have also read some complaints about quality at high res, but I am a happy customer

We've been working on an alternative infrastructure and saves up to 80% on transcoding & delivery costmore affordable solution at Livepeer Studio (https://livepeer.studio/).

It uses un-utilized infrastructure around the world and incentivizes independent network operators to join the network (kind of like a 2-sided marketplace for video-specific compute).

Please sign up for a free account and check it out! We'd love to get your feedback

Not necessarily. GCP, when used correctly, can be super cheap. You also don't know the contractual deals they have with GCP.

I was thinking the same. CF on the front would improve on it but still.

Hetzner or other bare metal providers would probably be a better idea.

CF meaning Cloudflare? If you’re serving video through them, then you’re in “enterprise plan” territory. You can’t do that on the free or “self-serve” paid plans. $5k+/m depending on bandwidth needs (and if you just need a cdn to push bits, CF won’t be competitive on price—their enterprise prices are tailored for companies that want all sorts of managed services and private networking stuff)

Um. Cloudflare stream starts at $5 per month and you don’t pay for encoding only storage and bandwidth. You can serve a decent video library for $500 per month.

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/

Ah, must’ve changed up their billing structure to provide more add-ons for the self-serve plans since last time I was dealing them them. That’s good.