Grid transcoding has the ability to scale performance linearly as you add compute resources. If an MPEG-2 source file takes 30 minutes to transcode to H.264 on a single server, then with grid transcoding enabled, that same file will take less than 6 minutes to transcode on five transcoding nodes. Or, if you had ten transcoding nodes in your farm, that same file would take less than 3 minutes to transcode.

In addition, grid-based transcoding provides better utilization of your transcoding farm, when transcoding content of mixed lengths. No longer will you be waiting on a single hour-long movie to finish, while the rest of your farm sits idle. With grid transcoding, your source content – short or long form – is transcoded via virtual slices, which are load-balanced across the entire farm, and provide the best efficiency and speed possible.