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Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

  • From: Marshall Eubanks
  • Date: Sat Jan 06 10:56:51 2007


On Jan 6, 2007, at 10:19 AM, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:


On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 09:09:19AM -0600, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
2. The question I don't understand is, why stream? 

There are other good reasons, but fundamentally; because of live
telivision.

In these days, when a terabyte disk for consumer PCs is about to be
introduced, why bother with streaming?  It is so much simpler to
download (at faster than real-time rates, if possible), and play it
back.

That might be worse for download operators, because people may download
an hour of video, and only watch 5 minutes :/


Our logs show that, for every 100 people who start to watch a stream, only 2 or 5 % watch over
30 minutes in one sitting, even for VOD where they presumably have some interest in the movie up front, and
more more than 9% will watch all of VOD movie, even over multiple viewings. This is also very consistent
with time, but I don't have any pretty plots handy. (Our cumulative audience in 2006 was 2.74 million people, I have lots of statistics.)

So, from that standpoint, making a video file available for download is wasting order of 90% of the bandwidth used
to download it.

Regards
Marshall


--
Colm MacCárthaigh Public Key: colm [email protected]