No particular reason - all four of us are web developers, and we quite simply, we each badly wanted a platform for web development screencasts to exist.
We differentiate ourself from YT in a few big ways. The first is our focus on developers. A YT Partner can post videos exclusively on development, but it's obviously impossible to include code markdown or have meaningful software-related tags. We also feature the ability to offer both free and paid videos; it takes a lot of time to make quality screencasts, and many of the developers we've spoken to have found YT insufficient for monetizing their content.
I think this is an excellent idea and will do really well. If you have developers who can walk us through real projects that can go live in the wild it will do really well. This can be like the Themeforest for screencasts. This will supplement nicely with Treehouse/Code School/Net Tuts videos because it looks like you guys will show how to do some of the rarer or less widespread tips and tricks that the big guys usually don't cover. Good luck!
Thanks Joseph, having developers release screencasts where they work on actual projects is definitely a big goal of ours. People often underestimate how much you can learn by watching someone who's an expert in something.
Off the top of my head, I see screencasts that are available elsewhere. They are merely aggregating, which is great - in a world filled with app stores and iTunes, discovery of a given horizontal should be more than a Google search or a retweet.
Thanks! Right now we've done a lot of aggregating, and we've partnered up with some great screencasters to share their content on our platform. That being said, we have a lot of exclusive content in our pipeline, so look forward to seeing a lot of new stuff soon.
What's your reasoning, and how you plan on differentiating yourself for content creators from, say, a YouTube Partner network?