tecznotes

Scott Karp writes:

If I were YouTube, I'd think long and hard about a business model based on cats flushing toilets and flatulence flambe. Anyone with any kind of professional interest in their video content will soon realize that YouTube's platform is increasingly a comodity, and that if your content is 1) really good, and 2) embedable, you're pretty much good to go, regardless of which platform you use.

Amazon's S3 (simple storage service) has been amazing for me, and I think that two of the three things YouTube and other video services provide (embedding, hosting, but not socializing) could be covered by S3 and a cheap conversion and uploading application. Local software would reformat video files to .flv, upload them to the user's specified S3 account along with the necessary .swf file for playing them, and spit out the HTML required to embed the video on your site. This feels like a week's worth of late night programming to anyone even marginally accomplished in Windows or Mac development. Amazon's web services account signup is probably not streamlined enough for this to be a widespread thing, largely because they're still thinking of it as a tool for developers, rather than public storage for the internet.