Having also spent the last decade or so building a similar service, the tech side is commoditized by at least a half dozen companies. The ingest workflow is sti

Having also spent the last decade or so building a similar service, the tech side is commoditized by at least a half dozen companies. The ingest workflow is still somewhat manual, and there's a lot of QA that has to go in to your metadata, but the tech side (transcoding, CDN delivery, etc) are commoditized -- especially if you're a network that already owns the rights to your content. This is all headed towards a world where the big ISPs run CDN nodes and all the channels buy delivery from them not because they force them to, but because the big ISPs can run their CDNs with a lower cost base (they already have the interconnects and disk space is cheap). The gatekeepers will still exist because they own a market control point -- you didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you? Apps are an issue, but they're not that cumbersome to create, even cross-platform. I was able to hack together a prototype iOS app that played back video from a CMS attached to a CDN reasonably well in about 4 hours -- and I'm not even a professional developer. For the long tail, there are always services like YouTube and Vimeo -- they're a better fit than a custom app anyway because you get access to a larger audience.