The "600+, AWS" detail is great to read, as confirmation that this kind of thind does work. We're urrently setting up remote AWS systems and finding a lot of moving parts for getting smooth playback while editing in AE/PPro.
If you have time to expand on the "bandwith and latency thing", I'd love to hear more. Even a "you need to be geographically within X miles of the instance" ballpark figure would be wonderful to know.
The "that appears to be what they want" sentiment will, I suspect, be quite amusing to anyone who's ever bought tickets for a Wu-Tang gig only to find that (random number significantly less than the number of known Wu-Tang members) actually turns up on the night.
I suspect (OK, I'd like if) someone will release a spamassassin/dspam variant targeted at ads as a proxy, optionally with some distributed Pyzor goodness thrown in.
In an ideal world, it would be open-source and locally-installable, a la Privoxy.
In a slightly-less-than-ideal world, it'll be hosted somewhere "out there". It will probably be wonderful for 6-12 months, then bog down as everyone starts using it, then the site owners will use it to start serving ads themselves. At which point their only hope for any kind of redemption will be if they've called the service some variant on 'samsara': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saṃsāra
If you have time to expand on the "bandwith and latency thing", I'd love to hear more. Even a "you need to be geographically within X miles of the instance" ballpark figure would be wonderful to know.