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Amazon Elastic Transcoder looks promising: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/latest/developerguide/introduction.html. If we can have maintainers upload a file to a temporary directory on the application server, we can upload that to an S3 bucket (using Amazon's internal network), and then have Amazon do the transcoding. I will research this this soon as possible. (Questions: 1. Do we need to monitor a job's status, and how would we do it? (We may not need to for the first iteration.) 2. Can we reliably predict the URLs to the video assets, or do we need to use their API to get this?) – Mark B.
Whether or not we host our own video, we should allow for embeds of audio and video from other sites, for example, Vimeo, YouTube, SoundCloud, Internet Archive, and so on.