I live in South Africa, and a load of people fly Cape Town <> Johannesburg once a week (according to your link, it's the 10th busiest route in the world). It's about a 2 hour flight.
I don't think the amazement has as much to do with the distance as it does the idea of living and working in two different countries.
I did exactly this commute for 9 months in 2009. Saw the same people every week.
With traffic on either end and airport waiting it was about 5 hours each way between Sandton and home in CT southern suburbs (before Guatrain, it may be better now).
I couldn't handle the Monday morning red eye after a while and started leaving Sunday afternoons.
In the same way as House of Cards isn't exclusive to Netflix, "Top Gear 2.0" will be sold to multiple broadcasters and distributors all over the world.
Top Gear was worth about $80m a year to the BBC in selling the series globally.
I love music startups (doing one myself). Is it similar to what Bop.fm are trying to do, but more around having a entire library of music (like a cloud-based iTunes)?
Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're keen to chat.
The majority of companies in the music industry are aware of the problems driven by the fragmented setup. Some react by offering additional features for user retention. Others continue to drive the fragmentation further. New companies emerge, focusing on eliminating this setup. (bop.fm is one of them. check : tomahawk, wyhd and kollekt.fm)
This fragmentation though, is more the user’s problem than the industry’s.
We start by accepting that music consumption, discovery and sharing has to be fragmented. Our competitors misperceive this problem and conclude that ‘sharing’ is broken in music. Taking a step backward, we know that the core problem is that ‘music consumption’ is broken.
On-demand services, download services, discovery services, terrestrial radio.. They are all complementary products from and end user perspective.
This is why we accept that a user needs access to all these services and fulfil different consumption habits. This should not prevent a user to create a music library; accessible from anywhere and anyone. The users need an online Winamp!
It looks like you've built your landing page in PHP, which is renowned for its scaling and security problems. I'd highly recommend looking into something like Scala or Lisp if you want your unlaunched product to have any chance in scaling to the millions of users you probably won't get.
I don't know if you have tried PHP recently, but with the frameworks like Symfony2, it's much more robust and feels natural to code into. I think you should give it another try. :)
