1. We are infinitely [1] faster at converting video uploads than our competitors now. Speed matters. This is a strong USP.
2. Publicity. There are a bunch of features that would certainly be equally useful to our customers. However, none of them would get much interest from hacker news. We got a lot of signups and page views from this.
3. It took me probably 4 full days [2] to implement this, including the screencast and blog post. That's reasonable for the value added by this feature.
--fg
[1] We are really infinitely faster if the upload speed is slower than our encoding speed. This is probably the case for 99% of all consumer internet connections at this point. In any case we reduced the time required for an encoding from SUM(Upload, encoding) to MAX(Upload, Encoding).
[2] We already made a lot of technology decisions that lowered the cost of implementing this. A competitor would certainly need much more resources to pull this off.
2. Publicity. There are a bunch of features that would certainly be equally useful to our customers. However, none of them would get much interest from hacker news. We got a lot of signups and page views from this.
3. It took me probably 4 full days [2] to implement this, including the screencast and blog post. That's reasonable for the value added by this feature.
--fg
[1] We are really infinitely faster if the upload speed is slower than our encoding speed. This is probably the case for 99% of all consumer internet connections at this point. In any case we reduced the time required for an encoding from SUM(Upload, encoding) to MAX(Upload, Encoding).
[2] We already made a lot of technology decisions that lowered the cost of implementing this. A competitor would certainly need much more resources to pull this off.