My sentiments entirely.

When I think of the internet, I think of vermin, both malicious software and malicious manufacturers trying to control you and your computer.

Oh, and I might never live long enough to get 100% reliable high speed internet.

Fast internet is a pipe dream like fast freeways in cities. The traffic will always expand to choke any road system. (Variant of Parkinson's Law?)

Back in the days when Moore's Law still applied, journalists were asking how we could make use of the faster computers becoming available. Well, I think we managed to use the extra speed very well, thank you very much.

Cloud gaming is something that I remember reading about in the mid 2000's. Like said above, works great in high bandwidth areas.

But, for video editing, it might be more plausible. We can already do 1080 streaming on modest broadband speeds. Once the footage is uploaded you won't need any more down speed then streaming 1080 video and unlike gaming, you don't require super-low latency connections. IE if you're 1/10 of a second behind it's no big deal, you just stop playback, wait the quarter second for the screen to update, then do what you want.

I've done similar years ago in college. One copy of Quake 2 installed on a Pentium 2 in my dorm closet, server running 24/7 & let the entire campus access that share as read only. Could get 24 people game going, all one a single machine. Awesome. :)

If we had infinite bandwidth in the network, we would not need local processing other than to run the network and provide the user interface.

This has not been my plight for 39 years in the computer business. According to the Social Security actuarial tables, I have 12.2 years to live. I may not experience infinite network bandwidth in my lifetime.

I forgot to mention the extra cost of uploading/downloading on the internet. Doing so for my hard disks is free.

+1 ALL the negative aspects....

can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to edit that way.

oh, and let's not forget there are VERY FEW people with connections that have the speed to deal with such huge amounts of data, let alone the cost.

When the government stops listening to the corporations that give them money who tell them that our slow internet speeds are fast then maybe something like this will work.

Meanwhile...

The unions need to stop paying the govt to listen to the corp, then everything will be good and happy. See, always someone else to blame. :)

I'm not seeing uploading as the issue here. If I'm running an editing company I can have my camera men bring the footage here, put on our servers, then the editors edit from their locations. No footage needed to download, just the stream of the desktop the editors are using.

If you're running a small operation then there's no need to consider doing this.

The preview window in Vegas on my machine is (currently) 360x240 (270 if HDV) in size. That size doesn't change if I have the preview set to draft/quarter or best/full, that window is ALWAYS 360x240. That's the data that is sent across. My CPU & HD process more data when I up the quality, but the window dimension never changes unless I change it.

Since my monitor is 1920x1080 that's the largest amount of pixels I can display. If you could stream 1920x1080 then you could edit remotely. That's ~4Mbps from looking around online. I'm ~3Mbps and 1080 pauses every 6 seconds for me for about 2 seconds. Want full 1080 preview then 8Mbps or so. Sending a bunch of clicks back over the network is nothing.

EDIT: the game setup has the player upload nothing, everything is already there, so it needs the same bandwidth as we would. So if they can do it then we're just lacking the software to do it.

I think the most compelling thing about NLEaaS would the up load of camera footage directly to the data center. Cameras interfaces are becoming very tool rich, and the ability to trim clips and upload to a services already exists. For production companies and news companies that need quick turn around, the workflow would be very quick on a data center of machine optimized to run a task. Companies have been tying to roll their own versions of this, and AVID is the closest one to actually making this work in the past. While YouTube has its video editor, its not a tool to be taken seriously.

It is also interesting that Sony just bought the pioneer in GaaS, OnLive:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/sony-to-buy-assets-of-streaming-game-pioneer-onlive-1428083620?mod=rss_whats_news_us

Pay as you go is the dream of all software vendors...steady revenue stream. Producers farming out their work to the lowest bidder -worldwide. Eavesdroppers, corporate, government, all watching every byte..
No thanks.