1. Individuals who want to share replays with friends.
2. Professional teams who want a scalable way of taking video of their players' games and hosting them on their sites.
3. Tournaments that want to host all their games in video format (don't want to distribute replays) but have scalability problems in doing so. They may be tentative about uploading such replays to your site, so a more formal partnership might work better.
4. Individuals who want to "watch replays" on mobile platforms.
5. Individuals who want to "watch replays" on machines that can't handle sc2 (or people who don't own a copy of SC2).
The need for replay watching is somewhat diminished compared to the days of Broodwar, when there was a dearth of videos of games available (nowadays, youtube videos of games are just everywhere). Where you might find success, is with groups who are really keen on watching replays of games that are one of those one in a million kind of games that weren't broadcast for a tournament. (I remember there was one such game -- Sea vs Savior -- during Blizzcon 2008 that was only played backstage and was basically never shown to the public)
You must play SC2 :) Yea I have a few ideas on how to monetize and leverage tournaments and pro players. This is still a proof of concept phase really - if people like it, and it gets some traction you'll start seeing some of your thoughts being targeted. With that being said, I am working on things in the near term to target a few of those.
For #1, there's youtube or just sending the replay to their friends.
For #2, I really think this would be niche profitable but would require the most polish and time because pro teams would probably want to jointly visualize responses to specific timings and save their annotations as a type of historical team-lore, but it would have to be a tight and stable.
For #3, (larger?) tournaments often have 2 game casters and it would be interesting to see different observations while still listening to a unified audio stream. What annoyed me the most when watching VODs or Twitch.tv casted replays is when the casters completely miss covering a multi-prong attack even though I can see something happening in the mini-map (e.g. all-in distraction + main/expo/expo drops).
Some casters are good and rewind to look at the action from a different POV, but it's still annoying and gets in the way of a smooth casting flow.
As a tangent, I wouldn't mind (far into the future) the ability to watch a web replay synced to a (pre-recorded) caster of my choice and play with the observer controls and POV while listening. In essence, that would require re-creating the realtime replay UI which is probably not feasible (but a former SCBW addict can dream).
For #4, killer feature. Ads ads ads, or strike 'service streaming' deals with mobile carriers so people can subscribe to your streaming channel and pay $1/mo for the privilege of watching SC2 replays on their mobiles.
For #5, there's some competition here like Twitch.tv, livestreaming, YouTube or VOD players, but ultimately you're right -- if people can watch synchronized web replays from multiple POVs and mob comment it should be enough to get decent attention. None of the other options allow for web interaction -- they're all modeled on TV audiences and distribution (i.e. faceless, delayed-alternative-channel-interactions). The closest is live-streaming where you can comment in the chat room while the player is playing the game, but:
A) there's usually no record of your conversation to ROFL/analyze later;
B) as the viewer, you have little say in which replay or game you want to watch next.
1. Individuals who want to share replays with friends.
2. Professional teams who want a scalable way of taking video of their players' games and hosting them on their sites.
3. Tournaments that want to host all their games in video format (don't want to distribute replays) but have scalability problems in doing so. They may be tentative about uploading such replays to your site, so a more formal partnership might work better.
4. Individuals who want to "watch replays" on mobile platforms.
5. Individuals who want to "watch replays" on machines that can't handle sc2 (or people who don't own a copy of SC2).
The need for replay watching is somewhat diminished compared to the days of Broodwar, when there was a dearth of videos of games available (nowadays, youtube videos of games are just everywhere). Where you might find success, is with groups who are really keen on watching replays of games that are one of those one in a million kind of games that weren't broadcast for a tournament. (I remember there was one such game -- Sea vs Savior -- during Blizzcon 2008 that was only played backstage and was basically never shown to the public)