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As a CTO or a product owner building a video-centric product or building video features in your product you have to juggle budget, people, technology and time to launch. This article dives into the total economic and development impact when using different kinds of video cloud providers - specifically between a multi-tool ecosystem like AWS Media and an all-in-platform like FastPix.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks, we interviewed five companies with experience evaluating and using AWS before choosing FastPix. We present the results to provide you with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of adopting FastPix in your product.
The key findings are as follows
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FastPix is an all-in-one developer platform to build video-centric products or video features in products. FastPix provides software teams with complete developer tools for video. This encompasses API and tools for video-on-demand, live streaming, video data & analytics, In-video AI, video player and linear channel playout. Customers spread across entertainment, media, learning, e-commerce, SaaS and others use FastPix.
For video, both on-demand and livestreaming, AWS and FastPix vary vastly in their degree of abstraction. Abstractions are the reason the software industry can build billion-user platforms instead of being stuck writing assembly for each project.
As an all-in-platform, FastPix isn’t just an alternative to any one AWS media product, we replace 10+ different AWS products across the video technology spectrum. In fact, we replace 14-16 different AWS products, but on average, depending on the company’s specific workflow, it averages around 10 products.
The reason FastPix and AWS platforms diverge in product count or put differently in abstraction is focus.
As a product focused on video spectrum, FastPix has merged, automated, and distilled functionality into useful endpoints within one platform. This reduces complexity for developers, CTO and founders. It promotes adaptability, innovation, and productivity. On other hand, AWS, with humongous audience, focusses on multi-tools which are. This approach promotes modularity and portability, ideally suited for large teams or service providers who have bandwidth to assemble it all and then maintain.
To understand the differences in time-to-market, let’s understand how abstraction and focus with a simple use case:
Consequently, for the representative clients in this analysis, with more complex workflows, this benefit when developing their product resulted in faster launches.
On average, teams using FastPix completed developing their video workflows in 1.5 Months as opposed to 6-7 months with AWS Media. This resulted in almost 80% less time for launch or they got to launch 400% Faster with FastPix.
For the representative clients in this analysis, with their specific workflows, using a focused video product like FastPix resulted in smaller teams and people costs.
On average, teams were sized around three full-time developers and 1 Manager or senior resource overseeing.
The breakouts of the respective clients and their teams are as follows:
Conservatively estimating the costs of $80,000 PA and $120,000 PA for two junior developers and 20% of a manager’s time respectively (they are much more than that in the real economy in the US) over the time for development highlighted in previous section brings us savings of around 90%.
It is reasonable to assume these differences in costs will continue from development stage to operations and maintenance.
Pricing video workflows across AWS multi tools can be a tedious affair. This is so because each has different billing metric, volume tiers and hidden costs. For example, following up on the simple video workflow we used earlier in this article, the billing metric for Media Package is GB, Media Convert is mins, S3 is TB and CloudFront is GB (conversely CloudFront volume tiers are in TB; go figure).
While we have done the math across the value chain for in-person conversations, in this section of this article we will focus on pricing two simple, but flawed, uses of AWS for streaming that we come across often enough:
There are many who use or try to get away with so-called approach (at least until viewers complain) rather than get tangled in AWS’s multi-tool multiverse for video and miss project deadlines.
To illustrate the pricing differential let’s consider a scenario: You have a 1-minute video which you put out there and it gets viewed 500K times. This is realistic as many UGC platforms have videos around the 1 min mark.
Let’s also assume this is a 1080p resolution video with a video bitrate of 5 Mbps (Note: the bitrate makes no difference to FastPix as we price in mins, but it does with S3 which charges on GB basis).
Here is the summary:
On average, FastPix is 60-65% cheaper than AWS for these workflows.
Please review this in-depth article for more detailed calculations. After perusing these calculations try to run the numbers for your workflows. While the range of the difference between FastPix and AWS may vary based on the use case, the material difference will remain.
That said, many folks use FastPix for video and use AWS for other product areas. This way they are benefitting from FastPix’ s all-in platform for video and still make use of their AWS or other cloud provider credits. A win-win. Also, on topic of credits, we offer a generous credit also through our startup program and also other pricing discounts for clients with strong monthly usage. If you wish to explore how any of this work, please reach out and we can discuss.
In conclusion, if video is crucial to your business, give us a try. We give you $25.00 in credit upon signing up, so you experience for yourself how five fellow product companies built successful video products with FastPix. Especially how they did so faster while at the same time increasing developer productivity and lowering monthly costs.
You can also book time with us here, to get some any questions answered and get integration advise.
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