And yet, despite YouTube's abundantly clear motivation for doing so it took them years and years to develop the hardware and it only recently hit production. Could it be that acceleration for video encoding isn't as easy as people are making it sound?

I'm waiting for the "meh, i could roll it out in a weekend" responses.

Of course I could;) It would just be hacky, ugly, unreliable, scale badly, use either GPUs or inadequate FPGAs, and fall over once it exceeded 10 users. My resume doesn't need to know that, though:)

You now know 1 way of not to do it.