This is HUGE in terms of lowering the barrier to entry for making a viable youtube competitor. Google spends tremendous amounts of money on video conversions that could be done in the uploader's browser. Maybe this will tip the scale.
It may be trivial for Youtube or Netflix, certainly not from a consumer's perspective.
If you wanted to run a YouTube competitor you would likely require better compression, which would take even longer. Now think about it running in the browser, which likely slows it down even more.
You upload a 10 minute clip and then your browser eats 100% of the CPU for the next hour.
And all of that is just for one quality setting.
I saw no problems with the video quality if I used -profile:v high -preset:v slow and set the output bitrate equal to the input's average bitrate. With those settings, I was able to reencode at about 130 fps - handy when the raw footage was 9+ hours at 25 fps. Yes, that's "slow" on the GPU. :)
When it comes to video hosting it's largely about bandwidth. Imagine you had a video that got 1 million views. 110 MB vs 100 MB file size. That's 110 TB vs 100 TB bandwidth - a difference of 10 TB. At a cent per GB that's $100 difference. Now imagine a video with 10 million views or 100 million views.
And the real difference in file size is likely to be larger.
Those kinds of fees would only happen if you were a tiny site and using an overpriced option like AWS.
As for SEGA, AOL, and IE, they never had any real stronghold (like a lock-in), they just had the users - those are easier to switch to something new. Games for example go stale, and you don't care that much for your older played games - you want the new shiny. A browser, you switch over, and you have everything you did before, including your bookmarks. AOL, had it's stronghold when the internet was 1/100 of what it is now.
I can see the internet going 100x larger now (except if it goes to 80 billion people out of the 8 billion on Earth).
right, Windows didn't lose their position because someone out-competed them in their area, but because a whole new category of device (smart phone) and a new category service (search) rose to prominence. (Also fears of legal problems tampered their normal behavior)