The New Economics of Transcoding: How VPUs Unlock FAST, AVOD & Back-Catalog Revenue

What if transcoding stopped being the constraint and became the engine behind your content strategy? In this episode, Arcadian’s Joe Waltzer and Josh Pesigan explain how Video Processing Units (VPUs) are transforming the economics and timing of video workflows—and why the real win isn’t just lower cost, but the freedom to experiment, iterate, and ship smarter.

We start with a reality everyone in streaming understands: massive back catalogs sit on shelves because cloud transcoding costs erase the margin. With VPUs, that equation flips. Suddenly multilingual versions, refreshed ABR ladders, and FAST-ready packaging become inexpensive enough to try—letting teams test formats, revive dormant titles, and capitalize on “Suits-effect” surges without committing huge budgets up front.

Then we dive into one of the industry’s biggest operational friction points: ad insertion. Traditional pipelines force teams to lock ad breaks early, long before anyone has performance data. Any change means re-encoding, delays, and cross-team stress. VPUs change that. Encoding becomes fast, cheap, and local to your workflow, so business teams can make placement decisions later—aligned with launch timing, audience insights, and real analytics. The result: higher fill, better yield, more experimentation, and far fewer internal fire drills.

The best part? None of this requires new tooling. FFmpeg runs on VPUs without new APIs or retraining, and deployments work in the cloud or on-prem depending on workload and economics.

If you’re building FAST channels, expanding AVOD, or trying to extract more value from your catalog, this conversation gives you a practical new mindset: use compute efficiency to buy strategic flexibility.

Links & Resources

⬇️ Download Arcadian Presentation:
https://info.netint.com/hubfs/downloads/Optimizing-Video-Workflows-with-VPUs.pdf

🎧 Listen to more Voices of Video episodes:
https://netint.biz/podcast

🚀 Test NETINT VPUs on Akamai Cloud (+$500 credit):
https://netint.biz/akamai_500

🖥 Learn more about NETINT VPUs:
https://netint.com/products

Key Takeaways:
• how VPUs dramatically lower transcoding cost and energy use
• why back catalogs become profitable again
• the Suits effect as proof of latent demand
• shifting ad decisions downstream for smarter AVOD/FAST
• removing cross-team friction in ad planning
• using FFmpeg on VPUs with zero workflow changes
• cloud and on-prem deployment paths
• replacing rigid pipelines with rapid experimentation
• the operational gains that matter more than raw cost savings

This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NETINT Technologies. Explore NETINT’s encoding solutions at netint.com.

Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Team Intros
• 0:19 What VPUs Change In Video Workflows
• 1:45 Use Case 1: Monetizing Back Catalogs
• 4:33 The Suits Effect And Cost Barriers
• 5:19 Use Case 2: Ad Insertion Without Friction
• 8:15 Pushing Decisions Downstream
• 9:36 Closing And Sponsor
• 9:49 Operational Wins And Massive Savings

Transcript

Voices of VIdeo: 0:07

Voices of video. Voices of video. The voices of video. Voices of video.

Joe Waltzer: 0:17

All right, so thanks for joining us. Um, we're gonna talk about how we see VPUs affecting the workflows we have for our clients. Um quick introduction, I'm Joe Waltzer, CEO of Arcadian. Uh, this is J osh Pesigan, he's our VP of engineering. Uh, Arcadian helps clients get their content to their users. So we sort of work everywhere in that sector, depending on what our clients need, but we do a lot of transcoding work, we do a lot of custom video workflows, uh subtitles, metadata, all that stuff. That's sort of where our our expertise slides. And we we've seen some really interesting things come with encoding and what VPUs unlock for our clients. And we've heard everyone talk about how cheap they are, we've heard everyone talk about how power efficient they are. We see those same things. We see massive gains in just cost and efficiency and all that stuff, but it's also unlocking some really interesting workflows with these teams and how they interact with their other teams and how they get their content into production. And it's it's it's coming with some uh interesting use cases. So we have two we're gonna talk about today that we've seen with some of our clients. These are real world, these are things that we're seeing now, these are things that we're seeing um as we work with more clients. And so, first, there's two problems that we've gonna talk about. Um, I'm gonna hand this to Josh to have the first one, but there's these huge content libraries out there, it's all back catalog. They want to monetize it. There are opportunities to monetize it. There's a lot of success stories in the industry about why you want to monetize your back catalog, but the margins and the cost structure has to be right, and VPUs are letting us unlock that. And then we're seeing all sorts of other things with AVOD and how that is affecting the industry with FAST. And we're gonna talk about another use case where the workflows around AVOD become much simpler, um, much easier, and uh we're gonna sort of explain all of the uh the benefits we're seeing. So, first I'm gonna hand this to Josh. We're gonna talk about the first problem that the Big Mac chat walk. Go ahead, Josh.

Josh A. Pesigan, Arcadian: 2:16

Thank you, Joe. I'm very excited. I'm very happy to be here. Uh I'm Josh Pesegan. Uh I lead the engineering department of Arcadia. Um, let's talk about problem number one. Um working with major CW, uh we've seen enormous uh content libraries. And this back catalog has you know, usual bench has unusual opportunities uh within this content. Um when NBC released um suits uh on Netflix, uh 12 years uh the twelve-year-old uh show became an overnight success, uh generating over twelve point eight billion units of views uh with an ethical. So this phenomenon is now called the suits effect. Uh this proof that the older back catalog content can find a second life in screen.

Joe Waltzer, Arcadian: 3:29

Um yeah, that was an excellent.

Josh A. Pesigan, Arcadian: 3:35

I said yeah, the problem is uh students want to leverage that uh catalog content, but do not want to incur uh relatively high costs of current cloud cost to the solution. Um content owners need a way to keep operational costs low so that they can experiment with what works. Um so BPU to the risky uh BPU offers uh exceptional efficiencies, therefore empowering uh students to explore and test things uh hydras without significant financial risk. Uh this opens up doors to delivering hidden gems within the content libraries. Um one good example of this uh opportunities in the fast and able services. Uh to discuss more about here this. Uh here's Joe. And Joe, take it away.

Joe Waltzer, Arcadian: 4:36

Thanks, Josh. Um so the second problem we're seeing, uh I don't know how many of you have ever dealt with transcoding for and insertion. That's a technical process and get tricky and complicated. Uh, but when you do it, you have to know where the ads are before you transcode. Because you have to insert special frames so that you can start playback at that specific spot. Um, and what this does is it pushes the decision about when and where and how many ads you play way up the chain so that operations need these answers from your business partners, from your sales team before they start transcoding. And that puts a lot of operational pressure on the teams to make sure they know this stuff way before they start delivering. And it can cause all these internal problems where the business team is put on the spot and they have to make these decisions at a time where they're not necessarily ready. And there's very little time to experiment because you are locked into that decision. The encoding process locks in where your ads play. So if you want to change your ad mode, you got to retranscode. Or you have to transcode in a way that is really inefficient and put tons of ad breaks in there so you can have flexibility downstream. So, what's happening when you allow transcoding to be fast and efficient and cheap, as these VPUs do, you can push that business decision way down the stream and you can transcode at a time that makes sense for the teams and when they want to make those business decisions, and it allows for flexibility. And anyone who has worked in the industry and worked with getting teams to collaborate and make decisions at the right time, they all know how complicated it is to get two disparate teams, the teams who are building the apps and deploying the apps, talking to the business teams who have very different goals and budgets and schedules. It makes it hard. There's a lot of friction there. And so when we're seeing when we go to these clients and say, hey, we don't have to do this now, we'll just retranscode it weeks before launch, and we have that kind of time, and the cost isn't huge, it lets them do more experiments. So let's just say, well, then let's not worry about making these decisions now. We'll put the ads in what we think they need to be, we'll transcode for those, and then we'll start doing experiments and seeing what works, what doesn't, and we're not worried about making these decisions at weird times for the business unit. And that's a really exciting thing for a lot of people, especially with FAST. Everyone's learning what works, they're learning what plays, they're learning how users are interacting with systems, and they need this flexibility built in to achieve what they want. It's it's unlocking lots of interesting conversations we have because they're very excited about well, we don't have to decide now. Let's go play, let's go see what happens, and we can transcode later or retranscode again and again and again because VQ is allowed to do this. So they're it's it's really it's it's making things much simpler operationally and allowing teams to be more flexible. So we're we've already talked about this. Uh it's it's just it's a much better system operationally. And the the cost savings are already there. Many people have talked about this in their presentations. You should go watch them if you're looking for the exact numbers. 75%, 80% cost savings. We're interested in the operational savings because that's what's really getting teams excited to to work with this new technology. Um so we'll just do a quick wrap-up. It's the cost savings we've talked about. 50% is probably low. That's probably the minimum. You're looking at more like 75, 80%, 90%. If you bring it on-prem, the cost savings start headed toward 100%. Like basically, transcoding becomes essentially free for your business unit. Um it it works in the cloud, we've obviously Akamai, CDN77, but it also works on-prem, so it works everywhere you want to be. There's no technical limitations to deploying these VPUs, which is again an easy conversation to have. There's no limits on where they go. Uh, it's based on the things that technicians already know. FFmpeg, everyone's using Fmpeg. If you don't know FFmpeg, you're probably not in the video space. It works great with that. You don't have to change anything, there's no new languages or APIs to learn. Just run your FFmpeg on these VPUs and you get these cost savings. And the experimentations, I think, where everyone is getting excited because you don't have to build in these really big budgets for your encoding and processing and time. You're not taking AWS, EC2 costs, and building them in your budget. You buy some VPUs, you put them in a server app, and then you're you've unlocked whatever you want to do with your encoding. ABR trees, whatever you're thinking about. So that's what's really changing for us is people are looking at this differently, looking at what they can do when they're not locked into this sort of old way of thinking about how you encode your videos. It lets them be more flexible, breathe a little bit and operationally be a little bit better at what they do. And that's it. That's our presentation

Voices of VIdeo: 9:31

. This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies. If you are looking for cutting edge video encoding solutions, check out NetIngth's products at net.com.