A similar current company is http://ZyncRender.com, although even today with great bandwidth, cheap cloud computing, and an amazing sync system, they still found it a hard market to crack.
While I am programmer, my first love was animation. I had done some cluster computing with thought experiments around huge render farms. When screamline came online a bunch of years later it caught my attention immensely. What a perfect combination of the both!
Aside: I tried doing EC2 type stuff in 1999-2001, it was really hard, too much resistance for running anything "sensitive" in the cloud.
What a great way for Intel to sidestep the artificial scarcity and release cycles to the world instead of chips! They could prototype new hardware, use "crippled" cpus that they couldn't sell, I thought it was a great vertical integration play that sidestepped many of the ridiculous economic factors at the time. Eventually it will get there when we have massive bandwidth, AMD and Intel if they are still around will sell mostly cycles.
I was really bummed to see screamline go out of business. It was like a sad canary.
Screamline Rendering Services, provided by Internet
Computing Services, has enjoyed working with our
customers in the computer graphics animation industry to
provide outsourced rendering services.
Due to a deteriorated funding climate for Internet-based
businesses and unfavorable market conditions, Internet
Computing Services, part of the Intel New Business Group,
will exit the outsourced rendering services business,
effective October 31, 2001.
