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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Andrew Odlyzko wrote: P.S. I have been puzzled by the fixation on streaming for over a decade. Is there really a much of a difference between streaming and buffering? Is XM radio streaming or buffering? Is TiVo streaming or buffering? Is AMC Theatres streaming or buffering? Is RSS feeds streaming or buffering? Geeks like to debate it, but the difference is mostly one of degrees not a bright line. Usually the data is processed multiple ways. A security camera may be both a linear stream and a random access buffer. A movie theatre may download a digital movie via satellite file broadcast but play it as a linear event at pre-determined times. True believers may like to think there is only one true answer. But it is probably more realistic that the network will need to support multiple different ways of accomplishing the same thing because different people will want to do the same thing different ways.
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