That doesn't really answer my question (and I am a potential customer). How exactly does zencoder add value to justify their additional costs? Converting video with ffmpeg is trivial in my experience. What exactly does zencoder do that's better than anyone else? Has zencoder actually extended ffmpeg in a deeply meaningful way--e.g. modified the codebase to handle new codecs, new containers, or transcode much, much faster than a basic ffmpeg install? The website is not particularly helpful in that regard and strikes me as a bunch of smoke and mirrors surrounding a pedestrian ffmpeg implementation running in the "cloud."

In my experience it is far more efficient to transcode very high resolution files (4k or even 1080p) locally, and then upload a real deliverable (at much greater speed now that it has been compressed).