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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?
> 2. The question I don't understand is, why stream? 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. Very good question. The fact is that people have been doing Internet TV without streaming for years now. That's why P2P networks use so much bandwidth. I've used it myself to download Russian TV shows that are not otherwise available here in England. Of course the P2P folks aren't just dumping raw DVB MPEG-2 streams onto the network. They are recompressing them using more advanced codecs so that they do not consume unreasonable amounts of bandwidth. Don't focus on the Venice project. They are just one of many groups trying to figure out how to make TV work on the Internet. Consumer ISPs need to do a better job of communicating to their customers the existence of GB/month bandwidth caps, the reason for the caps, how video over IP creates problems, and how to avoid those problems by using Video services which support high-compression codecs. If it is DVB, MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 then it is BAD. Stay away. Look for DIVX, MP4 etc. Note that video caching systems like P2P networks can potentially serve video to extremely large numbers of users while consuming reasonably low levels of upstream bandwidth. The key is in the caching. One copy of BBC's Jan 8th evening news is downloaded to your local P2P network consuming upstream bandwidth. Then local users use local bandwidth to get copies of that broadcast over the next few days. For this to work, you need P2P software whose algorithms are geared to conserving upstream bandwidth. To date, the software developers do not work in cooperation with ISPs and therefore the P2P software is not as ISP-friendly as it could be. ISPs could change this by contacting P2P developers. One group that is experimenting with better algorithms is http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu/ --Michael Dillon
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