Am I misunderstanding something here? I don't see anything other than an .mp4 video served via a tag from a URL that ends in .gifv. I was interested in seeing how it worked to look into supporting it for a mime type detection library I've written. The blog post mentions submitting a specification to the relevant standards organization. Are they planning on creating a new mp4 ftyp and registering a mimetype with IANA?
because lame marketing. the imgurl community is always asking for more servers and bandwidth, and the imgurl team is only delivering crappy feature on top of crappy feature that only makes things worse. their goal is not pleased users, its a big fat huge "exit". thats why new feature and buzzwords abound. it impresses investors, which is their goal.
They serve 2 billion images per day, and they never delete pictures that are still actively accessible from the internet. At no cost to the user.
In any case, cache is golden, and a 5 MB gifs off of their front page could be a 500kb MP4. That difference adds up superfast it's off of their front page and has 30M views.