Why haven't they started pushing these jobs down to distributed clients? I'd love to run an Amazon Transcoding app on my PC and earn credit that I can spend toward other Amazon services.
1, privacy - they would have to send you a copy of someone's video for that. 2, I expect the end user bandwidth is worth more than the CPU time you'd provide, so the credits they could give wouldn't be worth it to you.
Well, there are ways around #1. It seems they could split a video up into enough chunks to make the bandwidth minimal for each party involved (it may not be worth it for /them/, however).
Video encoding tends to rely heavily on previous frames so it's not trivial to split a video into small chunks for encoding and still get a good result.
Do you seriously think you can get any kind of reasonable compression using only operations that are data-independent?
Because they have gigantic, low-cost datacenters. They just don't need you. What they need is to use up the extra capacity on the machines they already have.
You might be insulted when you saw how little they could afford to pay you. The idle time on random PCs is worth less than the overhead cost of managing it.
The cost and time of pushing them out over the public internet rather than as internal network traffic, for one.
We are working towards something similar at CPUsage....