Does the transcoding balance renew with the beginning of a payment period?

The transcoding balance in your Lightcast Media Cloud does not renew with the beginning of each payment period. Transcoding is always an initial credit, not a recurring monthly one, as we do not price that into the monthly service packages, or else they would be significantly more expensive, which would be unfair to most publishers, who do not need as much ongoing transcoding services. For that reason we have transcoding subscriptions available as well as we do not want to increase the general Service Package prices for everyone, including all of those, who do not need monthly transcoding credits, or are just fine with buying some additional transcoding as they go, from time to time.

If you run out of transcoding, you can choose between a couple of options:

You can upgrade to a larger Lightcast package with more transcoding included. Please see a comparison of packages at https://www.lightcast.com/packages/ .
You can add more transcoding to your existing package by purchasing a transcoding subscription which adds a certain amount of transcoding GBs to your account each month. Prices can be found at http://www.lightcast.com/user/page/add-on-products (please log in to your Media Cloud account to view this page) and scroll down to “CDN Service Add-Ons”.
Or you can purchase a one-time transcoding amount inside your Media Cloud account. To make a one-time purchase of additional transcoding, go to your Media Cloud's Dashboard and click the “Refill” link to the right of the “Transcoding” bar, select the amount you want from the drop-down box, and click "buy". Watch how.