Elastic Transcoder could not handle 4K video, and only worked with static files stored in S3 - it wasn't designed for streaming content.

AWS purchased Elemental in 2015. There is some overlap but Elemental Media* services are more flexible and provide JIT encoding and dynamic ad insertion, to serve a broader market than ET did.

Disclaimer: AWS employee.

HLS, Smooth streaming, MPEG-Dash are all designed for streaming and that's what we use with Elastic Transcoder today. Used in conjunction with Amazon Cloudfront, I thought it was perfect for streaming content.

Does that mean we'll need to manually transition to the new services ? Are you planning a bridge or something ?

What about the cost of transcoding everything a second time ?

Instead of fixing Elastic Transcoder, there's yet another and better way of doing the old thing. Much similar to what happened with SimpleDB, OpsWorks, etc.

The alternative is shutting down your 1.0 when you release your 2.0. Keeping the 1.0 service running in maintenance mode seems pretty helpful to me.

No, the alternative is a design pattern called Façade, i.e. having the new backend support the old API via a translation layer either in the SDKs or in the infrastructure layer.

Elastic Transcoder lacked a lot in support of a bunch of codecs and output formats, especially broadcast and movie formats where unsupported. With MediaConvert they are likely using the conversion engine they got when they acquired Elemental.