My point is more does a render farm necessarily need to be one of those options? Actually I thought render farms were exclusively used by large 3d only productions rather than simple broadcasting networks that mostly deal in normal video? What kind of GPU based operations would such an organisation benefit from that they would need an in house permanent render farm?
Hm I guess for high-resolution image/video manipulation, compositing videos, rendering intermediate 3d animations/effects, and such. But you're right they won't need more than a small render "farm". They don't need to render Pixar movies...
I'd be interested to know for sure if the guy was actually running GPU or CPU based miners, but I suspect he probably was just running a CPU miner on everything he could get his hands on and hoping the return on the inefficient approach could be overcome by volume. Likely now he'll lose his source of income and get a lesson on risk v reward.
