Partly related anecdote: I did some contract work some years ago for a startup (Tellytopia, later acquired by Concurrent Systems) that was into the video over I

Partly related anecdote: I did some contract work some years ago for a startup (Tellytopia, later acquired by Concurrent Systems) that was into the video over IP space. Video transcoding was a part of the project, but I didn't work on that, which was in C++. I worked on some of the surrounding parts, in Python with XML-RPC, talking to Java, across machines. I remember that all or most functions in the app were XML-RPC-enabled, so that they could be located in different machines, which must have helped somewhat with scaling.