S3 is overkill for this. If its just storing images you don't need all those 9's for durability/availability that Amazon offers. Could easily do unlimited for $60 a year. There's cheaper services that do unlimited for less than half that price like imgur.
I need to underline that he throws video in like it's nothing.
Sure, just for images without responsibility of 6-8 9's for peoples' treasured decade of photos, you can approach the price. I believe Imgur also has, even pro accounts, a 5MB limit on file size and that brings a set of efficiencies on resources. Fine for pictures, trouble for video.
When 1-10 million people are uploading/downloading 200MB/min for video @ maybe 1MB/sec?, storage stops being the most painful problem.
This would be something of a netflix scale problem, but without some set of minimal control about formats, dynamic content throttling, etc.
I really don't throw in video like it's nothing. What I intended to highlight was that for 99% of users, the perception of what they get should be unlimited even if there are fair-use policies.
I don't expect that a $5/user/month model is going to support Chase Jarvis' needs. However I do imagine that at $5/user/month 90% of users will actually be very profitable for Apple as they'll use way less than the available amount.
The fair-use limits can therefore be relatively high as they're subsidised by the majority of people who don't use that much.
My point about wanting "unlimited video" was not that I expected to store my entire film collection on there - only that as a 90-95 percentile user I want to be able to do the stuff I do every day without worrying about low limits. I don't mind if there's fair-use limit I just want to be sure that I can do a "fair" amount before hitting it.
All of this is also putting to one side the fact that this is a 20 year investment for Apple. Data costs don't seem to fall inline with Moore's law but they still fall crazy fast. It was only 10 years ago we didn't have S3. Even now if the RAW files were stored on an Amazon Glacier equivalent ($0.01/Gb/month) while screen-quality versions were stored in a hot cache you could provide high dataplans with much lower costs than putting things in tier 1 S3.
If my canonical store of my images is going to be on a cloud service, I sure as hell want all those 9's for durability. It doesn't matter how cheap a service is, if it permanently loses precious memories.
