Zencoder, a cloud video transcoding service, wrote about video encoding, cloud infrastructure, and selling to developers.
HN commenters cite its advice that selling to developers is neither B2B nor B2C, and praise its API design and documentation as the best they've seen.
Quoting http://blog.zencoder.com/2010/09/21/doing-y-combinator-in-your-30s/
Does YC accept founders older than 30?
Yes. And according to PG, age is neither a penalty nor a bonus. He writes: “I don’t actually know the numbers. We don’t keep track. But I know there haven’t been any with founders in their 50s, and only 2 or 3 with founders in their 40s or their teens. Most founders are in their 20s or 30s. Completely guessing, I’d say 15-20% have founders in their 30s.” (That was a year ago, so the numbers may have changed.)
Basically, the age distribution of YC companies is pretty close to the age distribution of applicants. More YC founders are 25 than 35, but more 25-year-olds apply than 35-year-olds.
(Paul has an essay[3] where he says the ideal range to start a startup is 22-38. As far as I know, that isn’t a rule, just a suggestion. YC has accepted plenty of people younger than 22, and at least a few over 38.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809885
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1642525
[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
Which is to say, there were a bunch of people in our batch that were over 25. 25 might have been the median age of founders in the batch.
What program language are you going to be using?
I'd recommend checking out the available integration libraries (http://zencoder.com/docs/integration-libraries/#libraries) that we and our customers have created to simplify your integration with Zencoder. You can read our docs (http://zencoder.com/docs/) and API reference (http://zencoder.com/docs/api) for more information about the options you can set. Our API Builder (https://app.zencoder.com/api_builder) will also help you get started with seeing how some of the options fit together.
As for S3, we work in Ruby and use RightAWS (http://rubygems.org/gems/right_aws). That would handle the transfer of files from your users to S3. If you're using another language I'd recommend checking online for an S3 library compatible with your language.
+1 for HLS. HLS is an important aspect in saving money while using the CDN's. They allow for different streaming rates, and the player can download the video in chunks vs the entire video which saves money on bandwidth costs.
Encoding videos is important too, especially if you have users uploading videos, or you are getting videos from different sources, you can never depend on 3rd party sources because they'll always throw a wild card file type at you unexpectedly. If you don't want to do it yourself with ffmpeg, there are services out there like:
https://zencoder.com/en/file-transcoding
https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/
The MPEG-TS container (from 1995!) is also a lot less efficient than the more modern MP4 container. Overhead can range from 5% to 30% with bad muxing settings.
See:
* http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/12/08/announcing-the-clouds-most-efficient-http-live-streaming/
* http://features.encoding.com/blog/2014/02/24/simplify-http-live-streaming-encoding-com-hls-segmenter/
* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15661664/how-do-i-alter-my-ffmpeg-command-to-make-my-http-live-streams-more-efficient
* https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/2857
At http://voucherify.io (API platform) we try to follow Zencoder's advice
http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/05/31/selling-to-developers-is-neither-b2b-nor-b2c/
To put it in a nutshell, this means generating valuable content and implementing helpful libraries and integrations. Then we try to share it with our target (developers, technical product managers, CTOs) through ProgrammableWeb, GitHub and Quora. See e.g.
- http://www.programmableweb.com/api/voucherify
- https://github.com/voucherifyio/coupon
We're a team of 3.
Zencoder - San Francisco - Ruby Engineers, Video Engineers, and Dev Ops
Zencoder transcodes millions of videos each month for a thousand customers like Khan Academy, IGN, NFL, and Amazon. We're a small team of really talented engineers solving hard problems and making developers happy. Great product, office, team, and perks.
http://zencoder.com/jobs
We also have opportunities in Boston for engineers at Brightcove (who acquired Zencoder last year): http://www.brightcove.com/en/company/careers/open-positions