Twitter's Alex Payne: Why Scala?

Speaking as someone who's been meaning to read up on Scala for a while, I found it worthwhile (though I could have read a transcript faster...)

Here's the breakdown for those who might want to skip around: 0m-15m Introduction and Twitter's language desiderata; 15m-26m Scala features (high-level descriptions); 26m30-33m Actual code examples; 33m-44m Links: first books and blogs, with a rundown of which ones are most useful to different constituencies, then tools and libraries, again with descriptions of who might use them; 44m-48m Problems and weaknesses; 48m-end Q&A.

I would say that the segment from 15m-33m or so and 44m-48m are most useful for someone trying to answer the question "should I spend time to go learn Scala?" and 33m-44m are more useful for people who have already decided to learn it and are now looking for pointers on where to start.

Has anyone watched it long enough to tell if it's worth an hour of watching? (al3x you don't get to vote)

[Edit: Okay, it's a pretty straightforward introduction to Scala, along with some anecdotes about how they landed there. It's good, depending on your Scala knowledge level - it may be a bit slow if you've done much Scala reading.]

Does anybody have any idea why sites like this one and youtube don't make the video stream available as a .avi, .mpeg, or something else that's actually usable? It seems really strange to wrap something as simple as video in a closed wrapper like that, especially when the site hosting the content doesn't appear to have any concern about the copyright status of the video. I can understand it for hulu, comedycentral, etc, but why youtube and viddler?