Amazon Web Services is now hawking Amazon Elastic Transcoder, described as a highly scalable service for transcoding video files between different digital media formats that's supposed to save users a lot of time and money by eliminating complexity.

Amazon said customers can use the stuff to convert their large high-resolution "master" video files into smaller versions optimized for playback on web sites, mobile devices, connected TVs and other video platforms.

Elastic Transcoder apparently removes the need to manage infrastructure and transcoding software, providing scalability and performance by leveraging AWS services.

The service manages all aspects of the transcoding process transparently and automatically. It also supports pre-defined transcoding presets that make it easy to transcode video for smartphones, tablets, web browsers and other devices.

Amazon says with Elastic Transcoder customers can create enterprise, training, user-generated, broadcast or other video content for their applications or web sites.

Customers are charged based on the number of minutes they need to transcode and the selected resolution. The first 20 minutes of content transcoded each month will be provided free of charge to help users understand how the service can be used.

See http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder.