I don't want to be snarky in response to an ffmpeg developer, because I love ffmpeg and respect his contributions, but still, this is not exactly news. The explosion of the entire category of "video sharing sites based on Flash" happened right after ffmpeg added FLV support.
That was the missing piece -- before that, you could only convert videos to FLV using Adobe's proprietary (and expensive and crappy and GUI-based, not command-line) tools. ffmpeg provided the missing chunk of the pipeline, and a lot of people had the exact same "aha!" moment, and within a short time a bunch of sites like launched (or converted to a Flash video player from a crappy "Click here for WMV, Click here for QT, now wait a good long time" experience).
ffmpeg didn't just help YouTube, it helped make the entire category of video-sharing websites go big.
We use ffmpeg at Yahoo, and we used it at Associated Content to convert user's videos into FLV. ffmpeg + upload scripts is able to replace almost all of the manual time and 3 different Windows apps that editors used to do just to get a random video on the web.
Probably any that you've seen accept uploaded video from their users. My company's software is dependent on ffmpeg and a few other open source tools for converting and dealing with video. I don't accept uploaded video but I do a lot of transcoding and ffmpeg is excellent for that. I also use mp4box and handbrake if anyone is curious.
That was the missing piece -- before that, you could only convert videos to FLV using Adobe's proprietary (and expensive and crappy and GUI-based, not command-line) tools. ffmpeg provided the missing chunk of the pipeline, and a lot of people had the exact same "aha!" moment, and within a short time a bunch of sites like launched (or converted to a Flash video player from a crappy "Click here for WMV, Click here for QT, now wait a good long time" experience).
ffmpeg didn't just help YouTube, it helped make the entire category of video-sharing websites go big.