Amazon could be on the verge of displacing  some of its customers, like HD Cloud, Zencoder and Encoding.com, with the plan of adding a new cloud encoding services to its Web Services. The company has purchased some encoders from Elemental Technologies, which uses parallel GPU processing for video transcoding, as divergent from the typical CPU processing, reports NewTeeVee.

When it comes to transcoding, Elemental claims that GPU processing is 5-10 times faster than CPU processing. A single Elemental server is equivalent to seven dual quad-core CPU servers. The use of GPU will cause Amazon to add an additional infrastructure to support new servers, but this will be smoothed by better performance.

If a new encoding service goes out, adding to Amazon’s existent Simple Storage Service and CloudFront CDN offerings, a step further and Amazon can already offer IP video delivery. In fact, some media companies like Netflix rely on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing for cloud-based encoding.

For the cloud industry in general, layering added features to the base cloud service is enabling startups and large players alike to retain customers. It’s pushing the market in the right direction, as Mark notes with Rackspace’s cloud encoding service, “that switched from Amazon’s cloud due to lowered costs and increased performance. Creating competition in this space will drive already low end-user costs lower. This will only add fuel to the fire to many other New Media producers who have been following in the wake of SiliconANGLE.TV, as their production costs will be even more manageable.”