> It's really simple. As other people have pointed out, video encoding isn't stateless. You can chunk and encode in parallel, but there are tradeoffs. The big

> It's really simple. As other people have pointed out, video encoding isn't stateless. You can chunk and encode in parallel, but there are tradeoffs. The biggest problem is that you've taken what is effectively a CDN problem (serve the first chunk of a video) into a CDN and a CPU scheduling problem Serving video is cheap, apart from the bandwidth. So anything that reduces the number of bytes transferred yields savings. Real time encoders are not as efficient as "slow" encoders. For low volume videos (ie 99.5% of all video) the biggest cost is storage. So storing things in a high quality, or worse still, original codec makes storage expensive. Not only that you still have to transcode on the way in, or support all codecs ever made, in real time. In short, yes, for some applications this approach might work, but for facebook or youtube, it wont.