Not been around the last few days, since I made my comment. Also, I'm sure you won't, but please don't take any of comments as too negative, I'm just trying to keep you as realistic as possible. Please, please do not rush into this!
Firstly, I need to bring up the topic of decentralization again. If this is all going to be a centralized thing then surely it is not a DAC? You have said this could be the BitShares videos DAC, but if you are doing everything centralized, centralized storage, playout, ingest, transcoding, cms/metadata etc then where does the BitShares blockchain come in? If it is all centralized then where is the need for a blockchain?
You say that the starting architecture does not need to be decentralized initially and that you can convert. This is a really bad idea imo. Consider this: If you go the centralized route initially you will be building a company with real employees and an office and a data center with potentially millions of USD of equipment and then at some point you convert. Will you just say: "Sorry guys you're all fired and all this equipment we bought is no longer necessary as it's all going onto a decentralized storage solution"? Either the company works and you will be making a profit and there will be no reason to disband it or the company makes a loss and there will be no way of spending its now non existent money on turning it into a more efficient decentralized version of itself.
So, either this is going to be a centralized thing full stop and it is therefore not the BitShares video DAC and if so, you will have a very hard time competing with Netflix and Hulu etc and their economies of scale. Or it is going to be decentralized thing and then you
must work out the fundamentals of the technical aspects of this project. You cannot just say:
Anything is possible you just need the team to do it.
I love your enthusiasm, but this just isn't true. I want to cure cancer, but I can't ask a community to crowdfund my assembling of a team with the promise that I'll sort out all the technicalities of it later. I know this is "argumentum ad absurdem", but If you have no idea of the technical aspects of this project and you also think:
White Papers are useless.
You will almost certainly (and sadly) fail.
You have to work out the technical stuff here! Even if this project is to be a centralized thing
you have to work out the technical stuff! These things take massive teams of highly skilled and expensive engineers, huge sums in consulting fees, huge sums in legal costs and potentially millions of USD of equipment to build. I know this well because I have helped design, build and run broadcast headends. This is what I did before Bitcoin came along. If you do not know the technical undertakings of a project of this scale then how can you effectively plan and budget accordingly? How do you know how much money you need to raise in a crowdsale? Please don't just pick a figure and assume it is enough, because it probably isn't.
Finally I'm making some big assumptions here, but one of the reasons I assume Peertracks are either not doing video initially (or maybe never) is because of the differences in size and bitrate of audio compared to video. A video stream is significantly larger than just an audio stream because there is just so much more data in video. Also in a transport stream for video content there will sometimes be multiple video and audio payloads as well as the extra headers and info. On average the audio in a video stream takes up around 5% of the total data. To do video storage and playout in a decentralized manner is very difficult. User upload speed is terrible compared to download, so if the information is being served from other users of the system you will either have terrible wait times or the bitrates will be so low that the quality will be terrible. Several huge companies (we're talking 100s of millions in investments) have tried to do video p2p and usually give up. It may be possible with South Korean internet speeds, but for everyone else it just may not be possible yet. I bought a home NAS server the other year that also works as a media center and can stream stuff over the web. I thought that I wouldn't have to always carry my entire music and video library with me everywhere, but in reality it couldn't even stream audio real time due to my apartment's upload limit.