Re: concerning Raystream
I should note it's quite theoretically possible -- if they wanted to
-- for Raystream to try to become a legitimate company like Zencoder
and sell a useful encoding service. However:
1. They don't appear to have hired the relevant technical people to
be able to do this. Zencoder has had enough difficulty getting them
-- if you look at Hacker News, you'll often see their hiring posts
(they're a YC company, iirc). People who have wide-ranging technical
knowledge about multimedia are *shockingly* rare.
2. They have no real advantage over the existing competitors; they'd
be starting from a blank slate.
3. They will not be able to legally distribute anything that uses
x264 in it unless they open-source the whole software (i.e. GPL it) in
order to use the GPL version of x264. This will probably restrict
them to server-side activities. This is because we will not sell them
a commercial license. Unfortunately, CoreCodec had to sign an NDA to
start initial negotiations, so I can't give any details about what led
to this decision (beyond the obvious publicly-visible information,
which, to be fair, would be enough on its own).
The only advantage I can see is that they have slick marketing/sales
people, but even the world's best used car salesman can't sell a
product that doesn't exist. And why bother trying when you can just
run off with the money from investors who aren't paying enough
attention? ;)
If you have any other questions in the future, I'd be happy to try to answer.
Jason
AI
