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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?
Thus spake "Marshall Eubanks" <[email protected]> On Jan 10, 2007, at 11:19 PM, Thomas Leavitt wrote:I don't think consumers are going to accept having to wait for a "scheduled broadcast" of whatever piece of video content they want to view - at least if the alternative is being able to download and watch it nearly There's a severe Layer 8 problem, though, because most businesses seem to pursue only one delivery strategy, instead of viewing them as complementary and using _all_ of them as appropriate. When IP STBs start appearing, most of them _should_ have some sort of feature to subscribe to certain programs. That means when a program is released for distribution, there will be millions of people waiting for it. Push it out via mcast or P2P at 3am and it'll be waiting for them when they wake up (or 3pm, ready when they come home from work). Folks who want older programs would need to select a show and the STB would grab it via P2P or pull methods. Mcast has the advantage that STBs could opportunistically cache all "recent" content in case the user wants to browse the latest programs they haven't subscribed to, aka channel surfing. This doesn't make sense with P2P due to the the waste of bandwidth, and it's not very effective with pull content because most folks still can't get a high enough bitrate from some distant colo into their homes to pull content as fast as they consume it. The TV pirates have figured most of this out. Most BitTorrent clients these days support RSS feeds, and there are dozens of sites that will give you a feed for particular shows (at least those popular enough to be pirated) so that your client will start pulling it as soon as it hits the 'net; shows like "24" will have _tens of thousands_ of clients downloading a new episode within minutes. Likewise, the same sites offer catalogs going back several years so that you can pick nearly any episode and watch it within a couple hours. Mcast is the one piece missing, but perhaps if it's not being used that's just yet another sign it's a solution in search of a problem, as critics have been saying for the last decade? There is no technical challenge here; what the pirates are already doing works pretty well, and with a little UI work it'd even be ready for the mass market. The challenges are figuring out how to pay for the pipes needed to deliver all these bits at consumer rates, and how to collect revenue from all the viewers to fairly compensate the producers -- both business problems, though for different folks. Interesting problems to solve, but NANOG probably isn't the appropriate forum. S Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
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