Who pays for what with what? Who is in charge? Who picks the content? Does anyone pick the content? Who can upload? What can they upload? When can they upload? How long will it take to transcode? Can a video be downloaded to iPod? Archos? Zune? Who will monitor the uploads?
This is one of the stronger reasons I believe open source will dominate long term. Was Bittorrent the product of endless meetings, fears of how to cripple the product? Marketing droids who picked up on ideas that they dreamed up from partially understood questions from customers?
Someone has an idea, and they just do it. Failed projects litter the landscape. Do a search on SourceForge or Freshmeat and you can see their remains (hell, look my own repository, some living, some quite dead). I've always thought that this was great, it means people tried something.
They just did it.
Its annoying to see pre-release announcements like Chris is talking about. Its done frequently because companies want to show that they are thinking about the future, or wanting to stake out a space.
Its interesting to put this into the context of Microsoft. There was a day and age when Microsoft would make an announcement like this, and companies would say "well, MS will own it, so lets find something else to do".
Microsoft'ss inability to to accomplish anything in the internet area has changed this percption.
No one really cares. They make an announcement, the press rights something up about it, and then we never hear about it again.
And for engineers who get an idea today? The cost of distribution is now approximately zero. They can take a risk, spend some time on an idea, and then throw it at the wall. If it sticks, then they have a hit.
And if it doesn't?
They learn something.
And what does it take to make this happen?
Deciding to do it.
