3g video calling has been around for years, even in the tech backwater of New Zealand. It works well and although not super high res, you can really see what's happening on the other end.

Maybe it's like PXT/MMS messages that never took off in the US and took ages to get on the iphone.

This is great, a similar thing happened with Open EXR which is an image file format for high end film production. ILM open sourced it and it was quickly picked up by other studios, which lead to the software companies implementing it.

It seems like it's a good route for the VFX companies to take. Open source tools that are useful, then they get implemented in the main software packages which reduces your costs of maintaining plugins and a lot of custom code.

But instead of data loss that you get when a hard drive looses a sector, the the ssd sector just becomes read only when it fails. Your data is still there and can be mapped somewhere else by the firmware.

I'd much rather trust my data to a drive that will gradually start shrinking after a few years then one that totally fails.

the bandwidth to Amazon would kill you. It's not uncommon for one frame to pull in gigabytes of textures and geometry needed for the render. Rendering CG is very disk, memory and CPU intensive.

That's actually a problem with sequels. One people have one buzz lightyear or woody toy, it's very unlikely they'll buy another one when a new film comes out.

The cost in designing and tooling up for the merchandising is tiny compared to the income from it.

As a New Zealander I was able to work it out from the context of the first sentence. Pretty simple really