Zencoder customer Screenlight offers a private video sharing and collaboration platform that makes it easy for video producers & editors to securely review videos with clients, get their feedback, and get video projects approved.
The service solves communication and platform compatibility issues that people experience when using DVDs, email, FTP, YouTube, and custom solutions to review and approve videos.
A key feature of the service is fast uploading and video processing, and Screenlight relies on Zencoder for video encoding. For Screenlight customers, the result is that they can review, share and collaborate on video more efficiently. For founder and CEO Chris Potter, "An important aspect of our service has been making sure that we offer fast and reliable video uploading and encoding. When you are on a deadline and trying to get media out to a client for review, you don't want to get bogged down with failed uploads and lengthy encoding queues."
Potter recently quantified what fast encoding looks like for them and wrote up the results of some benchmarks that he ran, comparing the upload and encoding times for Screenlight and Vimeo.
You can read the full encoding benchmarks here.
Here are some key findings:
"During our testing with the 5-minute clip, it took Vimeo an average of 10:34 to encode the video, versus 2:35 for ScreenLight. In other words, it took almost 4 times as long for Vimeo to process videos for viewing."
"With the 15-minute test clip, it took Vimeo an average of 21:45 to encode the video versus 7:58 for ScreenLight. This is nearly 3 times as long."
Speed isn't the only important factor. Zencoder provided much greater consistency in encoding times.
"Vimeo's processing performance exhibited much more variability than ScreenLight's as is shown by the chart below on standard deviation. The 5-minute clip took between 4:47 and 18:15 to encode with Vimeo, as compared with 1:51 to 3:51 for ScreenLight. The 15-minute clip took between 6:15 and 49:34 to encode with Vimeo, as compared with 3:25 to 18:43 with ScreenLight."
