[jon_dahl]

Yes and yes: you can immediately seek wherever you want. If it's the first time a rendition has been watched, and if we haven't chosen to pre-encode the later segments (which we do sometimes), you might see a slightly longer seek time as we create the first segment after seek, but the difference is marginal and goes away on second view.

> It's interesting your customers want the video immediately

Yep. Some do, some don't. User-uploaded workflows usually care about this; imagine uploading a video to post to a social network and then waiting 20 minutes for the post to go live. (News and sports care about fast publishing too.) Premium media usually doesn't; if you spend a few hours recording a lecture or a yoga class, you don't care if it takes 10 seconds or 10 minutes to publish.

> How long did it take you guys to prove that design out?

You don't want to know. It wasn't easy. The biggest challenge is the ongoing tax; other additions to our transcoding layer have an added degree of complexity. But it's been absolutely worth it for us.