A Cloud Encoding Pricing
Comparison

AWS Elemental MediaConvert
Bitmovin
Dolby Hybrik
Vantage Cloud
ZencoderWritten by Jan Ozer

Sponsored by:

Overview
Selecting a cloud encoding partner is challenging, with well over a dozen vendors providing avariety of services. Directly comparing these services can be surprisingly complex, since theyeach offer a different take on features, performance, quality, and price. Even comparing
services on price is harder than it first looks, since they all use different pricing schemas. For
example, one vendor might charge by-the-output-minute while another charges by-totalgigabytes.
To assist companies considering moving to the cloud or changing vendors, Dolby
commissioned me to write this white paper comparing the H.264 and H.265 pricing of seven
leading vendors, including Dolby’s own Hybrik encoding service. By way of background, Dolby’s
service is optimized for large-scale media processing, and is used by companies like Sony
Pictures, Paramount Global, Google and NBCUniversal.
To compare pricing between the services, I needed to establish a standardized output
configuration. Since many media companies serve their viewers with multi-bitrate HTTP Live
Streaming (HLS), I decided to use Apple’s recommended encoding ladders from the HLS
Authoring Specification. This meant one test for the H.264 encoding (going up to 1080p
resolution) and one test for H.265 (going up to 4K resolution). I used the publicly available
pricing for all services.

Cost Comparison Summary
Table 1 shows the summary cost comparison for H.264 encoding, with cost computed as amonthly expense based on the total number of hours of source material processed with pricing
details provided later in this document. As you can see, pricing for the per-minute or per-GB
services ranges between $8 and $40 to encode a H.264 ladder from a single source hour.
The Hybrik service is an outlier at both ends of the hourly range. At very low volumes, theservice is comparatively expensive since the minimum service level is $1,500 per month. So,
encoding a single hour of source took $1 of machine time, plus the $1,500 base service cost. As
the number of source hours encoded per month increases however, the Dolby Hybrik service
becomes the overwhelmingly less-expensive option, dropping to a fraction of the other services
after 200 hours or so.
Monthly Source Hours
100
200
300

Service Cost

1

10

50

400

1000

AWS MediaConvert

$17

$170

$849

$1,698$3,395$5,094$6,792$16,980

Bitmovin

$25

$246

$1,228$2,456$4,912$7,369$9,825$24,562

Dolby Hybrik$1,501$1,507$1,537$1,574$1,648$1,722$1,796$2,240Vantage Cloud

$8

$84

$420

$840

$1,680$2,520$3,360$8,400

Zencoder

$40

$300

$1,215$2,000$3,240$4,860$6,480$16,200

Table 1. Monthly cost summary per hour of source for H.264 encoding.

Figure 1 shows the cost as a chart. The horizontal axis shows the number of monthly source
hours ranging from 1 to 1000, and the vertical axis shows the monthly encoding cost for those
hours for each encoding platform.

Figure 1. Monthly encoding costs by service and volume – H.264

Table 2 shows the summary cost comparison for H.265 encoding of the Apple-recommended
4K ladder. The costs here are substantially higher than for the H.264 ladder.
Service Cost

Monthly Source Hours
100
200
300

1

10

400

1000

AWS MediaConvert$208$2,073$20,730$41,460

Bitmovin

$92

$924

$9,238$18,477$62,190$82,920$207,300$27,715$36,953$92,383

Dolby Hybrik$1,509$1,593$2,426$4,852$5,778$6,704$12,260

Vantage Cloud

$61

$606

$6,060$12,120$18,180$24,240$60,600

Zencoder

$61

$459

$3,060$6,120$9,180$12,240$30,600

Table 2. Monthly cost summary per hour of source for H.265 encoding.

Two factors drive this cost increase. First, is that the ladder has three additional rungs (1 at
1440p and 2 at 4K). These larger resolutions require substantially more encoding processing –remember that if you double the resolution, you have four times the number of pixels.
The second factor is that H.265 (HEVC) is a more complex codec than H.264. H.265 canachieve reductions of up to 50% in bandwidth for the same output quality as H.264, but these
reductions come at the cost of increased processing requirements. H.265 can take anywhere
between 2x and 10x the processing time of an equivalent H.264 encode. Figure 2 shows agraph of the pricing data shown in Table 2.

Figure 2. Monthly encoding costs by service and volume – H.265

As I close this summary section, I will point out that achieving a precise apples-to-apples
comparison between the services is difficult. For example, the goal was to compare the cost of
2-pass high-quality encoding from each service. However, Vantage Cloud service only offers
one-pass encoding. How does Vantage’s single-pass output compare to the two-pass output
from other services? That’s beyond the scope of this analysis, but it’s a comparison you should
perform before choosing a cloud vendor.
In addition, note that few services expose all configuration options that impact quality, like thecodec preset, which trades off quality for encoding time. So, even if the service uses a highquality codec, like x264, you may not have control over the most relevant quality-related
configuration option. In contrast, Hybrik provides complete control over all options available in
x264 and x265, providing you with complete control over the cost/quality equation. Ultimately,
price can’t be your only decision point. You will need to assess the quality of your prospective
services to see if they meet your overall requirements.

Project Assumptions
I ran two different projects with two different assumptions. The H.264 project assumed a onehour 1080p source video at 30fps supplied in MXF format at 50 Mbps encoded to therecommended H.264 encoding ladder in the Apple HLS Authoring Specification. I also encoded
two audio streams, one at 128 kbps for the 540p resolution rungs and higher, and one at 64kbps for the lowest ladder rungs. I packaged the video in a single ABR format using two-pass
encoding (if available). For consistency, I priced all services assuming operation in the Amazon
AWS US East region.
Table 3 shows the H.264 encoding ladder, with nine video layers plus two audio layers. When
you’re paying by the minute, each rung is a separate minute, so each source hour generates

540 minutes of output video (60 minutes times nine rungs) plus 120 audio output minutes (60minutes times 2 rungs). Most vendors charge different prices for UHD, Full HD, SD, and audio
minutes, so you’ll need to know the minutes of each type to accurately calculate the price.
Layer #

Layer Size

Video (Mb/s)

Audio (Mb/s)

Total (Mb/s)

Total (GB/hr)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

1920x1080
1920x1080
1280x720
1280x720
960x540640x360480x270416x234416x234

7.800
6.000
4.500
3.000
2.000
1.100
0.730
0.365
0.145

0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

7.800
6.000
4.500
3.000
2.000
1.100
0.730
0.365
0.145

3.43
2.64
1.98
1.32
0.88
0.48
0.32
0.16
0.06

Audio 164 kbps

0.000

0.064

0.064

0.03

Audio 2128 kbps

0.000

0.128

0.128

0.06

Total

25.64

0.19

25.83

11.35

Table 3. H.264 encoding ladder

As shown in Table 3, each source video hour generates a total of 11.35 GB of output, which I
computed because encoding.com charges by the GB of combined input and output. At 50
Mbps, our one-hour source video equals 21.97 GB of input, which totals 33.32 GB (source plus
output) for each hour of video processed.
The HEVC test project assumed a one-hour 30 fps 4K video in MXF format at 200 Mbps
encoded to the recommended standard dynamic range HEVC Apple-recommended encoding
ladder as shown in Table 4. The ladder includes 12 video layers, plus 2 audio layers. As before,
each output is a separate minute, so each hour of source video generates 720 minutes of output
video (60 minutes times 12 rungs) and 120 output audio minutes (60 minutes times 2 rungs).
Layer #

Layer Size

Video (Mb/s)

Audio (Mb/s)

Total (Mb/s)

Total (GB/hr)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

3840 x 2160
3840 x 2160
2560 x 1440
1920 x 1080
1920 x 1080
1280 x 720
1280 x 720
960 x 540
960 x 540

16.80011.600
8.100
5.800
4.500
3.400
2.400
1.600
0.900

0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

16.80011.600
8.100
5.800
4.500
3.400
2.400
1.600
0.900

7.38
5.10
3.56
2.55
1.98
1.49
1.05
0.70
0.40

10

960 x 540

0.600

0

0.600

0.26

11

768 x 432

0.300

0

0.300

0.13

12

640 x 360

0.145

0

0.145

0.06

Audio 1
Audio 264 kbps
128 kbps
Total Bandwidth

0.000
0.000
56.15

0.064
0.128
0.19

0.064
0.128
56.34

0.03
0.06
24.76

Table 4. H.265 encoding ladder

For a 200 Mbps source video, the input equals 87.89 GB/hour for a total of 112.65 GB per hourof processed video.

Pricing Models
There are four basic pricing models in the cloud encoding market These are:Per-minute pricing – Here the service charges by the minute of output. Most companies in ourcomparison use this pricing model, which works one of two ways (which I’ll explain further foreach service). Some services have a fixed price for each form of output: e.g., SD is $0.02/min;
HD is $0.04/min, audio is $0.005/min.
Alternately, other services have one standard per-minute price (e.g., $0.02/minute) withmodifiers for the resolution or output codec. For example, an HD minute might have a 2x
multiplier, a UHD minute might have a 4x multiplier, and HEVC output might have a 2x
multiplier. These multipliers combine, so 4K HEVC output would cost 8x SD H.264 output.
Per-GB pricing – Here, the service charges by the total GB of input/output minutes. Because
the source format can have a big impact on the overall cost, it is important to know what yourexpected sources will be. The only service in our comparison using this pricing is encoding.com.
Dedicated machine pricing - Some companies allow you to rent a computer in the cloud andprocess as much content as possible during the rental period. This is generally less expensive
than per-GB or per-minute pricing but is very service provider and project specific. Since thecompanies in our comparison don’t publish pricing for this option, I didn’t attempt to computepricing under this model.
Dolby Hybrik pricing – Dolby Hybrik uses a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) pricing model. The
Hybrik service manages the media processing, but the machines processing the video are
actually running in your own cloud account on either Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google
GCP. In addition to processing cost, this has the advantage of safeguarding your data in yourown Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment.
With Hybrik, you don’t pay Dolby for the machine time that you use – you pay either AWS,
Azure or GCP directly for that. You pay a flat monthly fee to Dolby based on the total number ofcloud machines that you want to be able to simultaneously run. Hybrik is designed to spin-up
machines on the “spot” market, which is substantially less expensive than using on-demandmachines. The fees to Dolby are:•••

10 cloud machines - $1,500/month
100 cloud machines - $7,500/month1000 cloud machines - $15,000/month

As you’ll see, the Hybrik costs in our comparison includes both the Dolby Hybrik fee and thecost of the machine time paid to the cloud vendor, which was AWS in this case.
Note that cloud platforms like AWS, GCP and Azure charge for data to be moved outside of theregion where it is stored. So, for example, if you were to take data stored in us-east-1 on AWS
and process it on a service running in eu-west-1, you would incur a data transfer charge. If yourdata was stored on one platform, and you wanted to transcode on a service on a different
platform, your data transfer charge would be even higher. Our assumption in the pricing
comparisons is that all storage and services are running on the same platform in the same
region.

The next section gives a summary of the pricing comparisons between the services. To ensure
accuracy, I checked my computations with each service, so overall cost should be very close toactual. However, prices and pricing schemas change, and cost analysis can be surprisingly
complex, so I encourage you to do your own research using this whitepaper as a guide to help
you understand the options available in the market.
As you would expect, at large volumes you may be able to negotiate lower pricing with a
specific vendor. Since I was not in a position to negotiate pricing, I used published pricing for all
services. When vendors offered different pricing schemas, I used the schema most comparable
to the other services.

Detailed Cost Analysis
Dolby Hybrik Costs
To calculate Dolby Hybrik costs, I created encoding ladders as specified above and rendered
the audio and video in the Hybrik system using spot pricing. Other than two-pass encoding, I left
all performance-related options like profile and preset at their default configurations (which was
the medium preset for both H.264 and H.265).
As shown in Table 5, the 1080p H264 project took 2.83 hours to compute on c5.4xlarge
instances that cost $0.26/hour on the spot market for a total processing cost of $0.74. The 4K
HEVC project took 35.62 hours of machine time on the same instances for a processing cost of$9.26/hour. Remember that machine time is different from elapsed time – if 10 machines areworking on the same file, then 35 hours of machine time would be 3.5 hours of elapsed time.

10

MachineTime (hrs.)
2.83

MachineType
c5.4xlarge

MachineCost ($/hr)
$0.26

10

35.62

c5.4xlarge$0.26

Job Type# Machines

H264 HLS (9 video layers)
H265 HLS (12 video layers)

Total Cost
$0.74
$9.26

Table 5. Machine time to encode the test project on Hybrik.

In terms of service level, Hybrik could produce over 1,000 hours of H264 output with only 10
cloud instances, which costs $1,500/month. With HEVC I had to jump to the next service level(20 instances for $3,000/month) to complete 200 hours of HEVC, which was sufficient for allother encoding levels. To keep things simple, I computed and presented the H.264 and HEVC
comparisons separately.
Now let’s look at charges for the other services.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert Costs
AVS Elemental MediaConvert is the pay-as-you-go option for accessing the AWS Elemental
Technologies encoding stack. There are two pricing tiers, Basic and Professional, with the latter
necessary to access two-pass encoding. H.264 pricing for 30fps 2-pass encoding is$0.021/minute for SD, $0.042/minute for HD, and $0.005/minute for audio, producing a cost perhour for H.264 output of $16.98, compared to Hybrik’s processing-only cost of $0.74 (Table 6).

Monthly Source HoursAWS H.264 Cost

1

10

100

200

300

400

1000

SD cost (5 rungs)

$6.30

$63

$630

$1,260$1,890$2,520$6,300HD cost (4 rungs)$10.08$101$1,008$2,016$3,024$4,032$10,080

Audio cost (2 rungs)

$0.36

$3.6

$36

$72

$108

$144

$360

MediaConvert Total

$17

$170

$1,698$3,396$5,094$6,792$16,980

Hybrik Total$1,501$1,507$1,574$1,648$1,722$1,796$2,240

Table 6. AWS Elemental MediaConvert costs for monthly source hours – H.264.

For 30 fps 2-pass HEVC encoding, AWS Elemental MediaConvert charges $0.017/minute forSD, or 8x the cost of H.264, $0.336/minute for HD, and $0.672 for 4K, with audio at$0.005/minute. Table 7 presents the results, showing an HEVC ladder cost of $207.30/hour
compared to Hybrik’s processing-only cost of $9.26.
Monthly Source HoursAWS H.265 Cost

1

SD cost (5 rungs)$50.40

10

100

200

300

400

1000

$504

$5,040$10,080$15,120$20,160$50,400

HD cost (4 rungs)$80.64$806$8,064$16,128$24,192$32,256$80,640

4K cost (3 rungs)$120.96$1,210$12,096$24,192$36,288$48,384$120,960

Audio cost (2 rungs)

$0.60

$6.00

$60

$120

$180

$240

$600

MediaConvert Total$208$2,073$20,730$41,460$62,190$82,920$207,300$1,509$1,593$2,426$4,852$5,778$6,704$16,760

Hybrik Total

Table 7. AWS Elemental MediaConvert costs for monthly source hours – HEVC.

Bitmovin
Bitmovin offers two modes of pricing: Software-as-a-Service and deployment within a managed
or private cloud. I show SaaS costs here, as Bitmovin does not publish their pricing for a private
deployment. Note that with the private deployment model, you pay your own hardware costs,
plus a per-minute fee that depends upon volume and encoding type. Still, if you opt for a private
deployment, your overall costs should be lower than those shown below.
To compute SaaS costs, I divided Bitmovin’s baseline encoding charge ($5,499 per year) by the
number of included minutes (225,000), which equals about $0.024/minute, though most larger
customers will likely qualify for lower pricing. Like other services, there are multipliers for HD (2X
minutes) and UHD (4x minutes). There is also a multiplier depending on the codec used and for
two-pass encoding. The Bitmovin comparison H.264 to Dolby Hybrik is shown in Table 10.

Monthly Source Hours
Bitmovin H.264 Cost

1

10

100

200

300

400

1000

SD mins. (5 rungs @ 1x)

300

3,000

30,00060,00090,000120,000

300,000

HD mins. (4 rungs @ 2x)

480

4,800

48,00096,000144,000

192,000

480,000

Total video minutes

780

7,800

78,000156,000

234,000

312,000

780,000

2-pass encoding (.25x)

195

1,950

19,50039,00058,50078,000

195,000

Total video minutes

975

9,750

97,500

195,000

292,500

390,000

975,000

Audio mins. (2 @ .25x)

30

300

3,000

6,000

9,000

12,00030,000Total minutes

1,005

10,050100,500

201,000

301,500

402,000

1,005,000

Per-minute charge$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024

Bitmovin Total

$25

$246

$2,456$4,912$7,369$9,825$24,562

Hybrik Total$1,501$1,507$1,574$1,648$1,722$1,796$2,240

Table 10. Bitmovin costs for monthly source hours – H.264

Regarding our 4K HEVC scenario, Bitmovin charges a 2x premium for HEVC. This means that a
4K HEVC video layer (defined as between 1080 and 2160 vertical resolution) would have a 8X
multiplier on total minutes charged. Table 11 shows the results for H.265 encoding.

Cost Rollup

1

10

100

200

300

400

1000

SD mins. (5 rungs @ 1x)

300

3,000

30,000HD mins. (4 rungs @ 2x)

480

4,800

48,00060,00090,000120,000

300,000

96,000144,000

192,000

480,000

4K minutes (3 rungs @ 4x)

720

7,200

72,000144,000

216,000

288,000

720,000

Total video minutes

1,500

HEVC Premium (@ 2x)

3,000

15,000150,000

300,000

450,000

600,000

1,500,000

30,000300,000

600,000

900,000

1,200,000

3,000,000

2-pass encoding (.25x)

750

7,500

75,000150,000

225,000

300,000

750,000

Total video minutes

3,750

37,500375,000

750,000

1,125,000

1,500,000

3,750,000

Audio mins. (2 @ .25x)

30

300

3,000

6,000

9,000

12,00030,000Total minutes

3,780

37,800378,000

756,000

1,134,000

1,512,000

3,780,000

Per-minute charge$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024$0.024

Bitmovin Total$92.38$924$9,238$18,477$27,715$36,953$92,383

Hybrik Total$1,509$1,593$2,426$4,852$5,778$6,704$16,760

Table 11. Bitmovin costs for monthly source hours – HEVCVantage Cloud
Vantage Cloud charges $0.01/per-minute, with adjustments for resolution, frame rate, andcodec. Additionally, audio is charged at .5x minutes, or $0.005/minute. For H.264, there’s a 2x
adjustment for HD video. This produces a cost per hour for the H.264 output of $8.40, compared
to Hybrik’s processing-only cost of $0.74 (Table 14).
Monthly Source Hours
Vantage Cloud H.264 Cost

1

10

100

200

300

400

1000

SD mins. (5 rungs)

300

3,000

30,00060,00090,000120,000

300,000

HD mins. (4 rungs @ 2x)

480

4,800

48,00096,000144,000

192,000

480,000

Total video minutes

780

7,800

78,000156,000

234,000

312,000

780,000

Audio mins. (2 rungs @ .5x)

60

600

6,000

12,00018,00024,00060,000Total minutes

840

8,400

84,000168,000

252,000

336,000

840,000

Per-minute charge

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

Vantage Cloud Total

$8.40

$84

$840

$1,680$2,520$3,360$8,400Hybrik Total$1,501$1,507$1,574$1,648$1,722$1,796$2,240

Table 14. Vantage Cloud costs for monthly source hours – H.264

Vantage Cloud charges 4x minutes for HEVC and another 4x minutes for 4K video, producing
an HEVC cost of $60.60/hour compared to Hybrik’s processing-only cost of $9.26 (Table 15).
Monthly Source Hours
Cost Rollup

1

10

100

200

300

400

1000

SD mins. (5 rungs @ 4x)

1,200

12,000120,000

240,000

360,000

480,000

1,200,000

HD mins. (4 rungs @ 8x)

1,920

19,200

192,000

384,000

576,000

768,000

1,920,000

4K mins (3 rungs @ 16x)

2,880

28,800288,000

576,000

864,000

1,152,000

2,880,000

Total video minutes

6,000

60,000600,000

1,200,000

1,800,000

2,400,000

6,000,000

Audio mins. (2 rungs @ .5x)

60

600

6,000

12,00018,00024,00060,000Total minutes

6,060

60,600606,000

1,212,000

1,818,000

2,424,000

6,060,000

Per-minute charge

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

$0.01

Vantage Cloud Total$60.60$606$6,060$12,120$18,180$24,240$60,600

Hybrik Total$1,509$1,593$2,426$4,852$5,778$6,704$16,760

Table 15. Vantage Cloud costs for monthly source hours – HEVC.

ZencoderZencoder prices on a per-minute basis with the tiered pricing based on the number of minutes
per month. With no commitment, the cost is $0.05 per minute. With a $2000/month commitment,
the cost can be as low as $0.02 per minute.
Each minute of SD H.264 output counts as 1 regular minute, with HD video at 2x minutes, UHD
at 4x minutes, and audio at .25x minutes. For the H.264 project, this yields the results shown in
Table 16.

Monthly Source Hours
Zencoder H.264 Costs

1

10

100

200

300

400

1000

SD mins. (5 rungs)

300

3,000

30,00060,00090,000120,000

300,000

HD mins. (4 rungs @ 2x)

480

4,800

48,00096,000144,000

192,000

480,000

Total video minutes

780

7,800

78,000156,000

234,000

312,000

780,000

Audio mins. (2 rungs @ .25x)

30

300

3,000

6,000

9,000

12,00030,000Total minutes

810

8,100

81,000162,000

243,000

324,000

810,000

Monthly commitment

$40

$300

$2,000$2,000$2,000$2,000$2,000Included minutes

1,000

10,000100,000

100,000

100,000

100,000

100,000

Overage-190-1,900-19,000

62,000143,000

224,000

710,000

Per-minute Charge$0.040$0.030$0.020$0.020$0.020$0.020$0.020Overage charge

$0

$0

$0

$1,240$2,860$4,480$14,200

Zencoder Total

$40

$300

$2,000$3,240$4,860$6,480$16,200

Hybrik Total$1,501$1,507$1,574$1,648$1,722$1,796$2,240

Table 16. Zencoder costs for monthly source hours – H.264

Zencoder doesn’t charge extra for HEVC; according to my contact at Brightcove, “This is one
way we hope we can motivate our customers to migrate to use more modern codec
technologies. This also enables us to generate optimal multi-codec profiles without transcoding
cost being a factor that influences it.” You see the HEVC cost rollup for Zencoder in Table 17.
Monthly Source Hours
Zencoder H265 Costs

1

10

100

200

300

400

1000

SD mins. (5 rungs)

300

3,000

30,00060,00090,000120,000

300,000

HD mins. (4 rungs @ 2x)

480

4,800

48,00096,000144,000

192,000

480,000

4K (3 rungs at 4x minutes)

720

7,200

72,000144,000

216,000

288,000

720,000

Total video minutes

1,500

15,000150,000

300,000

450,000

600,000

1,500,000

Audio mins. (2 rungs @ .25x)

30

300

3,000

6,000

9,000

12,00030,000Total minutes

1,530

15,300153,000

306,000

459,000

612,000

1,530,000

Monthly$40$300$2,000$2,000$2,000$2,000$2,000Included minutes

1,000

10,000100,000

100,000

100,000

100,000

100,000

Overage

530

5,300

53,000206,000

359,000

512,000

1,430,000

Charge$0.040$0.030$0.020$0.020$0.020$0.020$0.020Overage charge$21.20$159$1,060$4,120$7,180$10,240$28,600

Zencoder total$61.20$459$3,060$6,120$9,180$12,240$30,600

Hybrik total$1,509$1,593$2,426$4,852$5,778$6,704$16,760

Table 17. Zencoder costs for monthly source hours – HEVC

AnalysisAt the very least, the foregoing should inform you that there’s great variability in pricing for cloud
encoding. That stated, for most high-volume streaming producers, encoding is not yet acommodity, as most companies require features, workflows, and outputs that not all vendors
support.

Still, when multiple vendors check all the required boxes, price and quality become criticaldifferentiators. Remember that you really can’t assess price without considering output quality,
so to get to an apples-to-apples pricing comparison, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves andperform test encodes on all services that make your short list.