Holiday buying season is right around the corner, and soon you’ll be subjected to advertising from multiple sources to buy a new UHD TV set. I like shiny new objects as much as the next guy, but before you succumb, you should know that there’s a good chance that the set will be obsolete within the next couple of years. …

On one level, Amazon’s Elastic Transcoder is a finely-tuned service well crafted for the largest sweet spot of the cloud encoding market, Plain Jane H.264 transcoding. On another level, its a service that aimed low from an interface and usability standpoint, and clearly hit its mark. I’m used to the public side of the Amazon house, which is always top …