From Leonardo, who founded MPEG, on the page linked:
"Even before it has ceased to exists, the MPEG engine had run out of steam – technology- and business wise. The same obscure forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their interests impeding its technical development and keeping it locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models delaying market adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new technologies. From facilitators of new opportunities and experiences, MPEG standards have morphed from into roadblocks."
It's been such a disappointing trend of companies initially welcoming developers, just to then eat their lunch. Twitter has been one of the worst: they killed their developer ecosystem.
Apple falls very far from that tree. Lots of money is being transferred to developers even today. It's just hard to see because so much is getting sloshed around.
What's changed? The interface and primitives available for building applications. Rather than having to create a blockchain, we can _use_ a blockchain to do the timestamping.
Our insight is that this is still too hard to have quick access to use the blockchain meaningfully. So this service is a wrapper around those blockchain/cryptography primitives making it easy to create and lookup. It's the indexing part that can make the difference between a useful app in theory and in practice. In theory anyone could read the blockchain and create their own index from certain data on it...in practice that's more work than most will do... hence this kind of service.
Marginal costs can be upheld through protection, self-regulation, and enforcement -- essentially of human rights.
I think people who are able to make a living by doing such work - won't burn all the money by buying yachts and party airplanes (like modern Internet "heroes" of entrepreneurship) - but by creating more pro-bono information work.
