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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: death of the net predicted by deloitte -- film at 11
At 02:57 PM 2/11/2007, Paul Vixie wrote: > Has anyone considered that perhaps google is not looking at beating > Microsoft but instead at beating TIVO, ABC, CBS, Warner Cable, etc? IP Multicast as a solution to video distribution is a non-starter. IP Multicast for the wide area is a failure. It assumes large numbers of people will watch the same content at the same time. The usage model that could work for it most mimics the broadcast environment before cable TV, when there were anywhere from three to ten channels to choose from, and everyone watched one of those. That model has not made sense in a long time. The proponents of IP Multicast seem to have failed to notice this. so if tivo and the others wanted to deliver all that crap using IP, would they do what broadcast.com did (lots of splitter/repeater stations), or do what google is presumably doing (lots of fiber), or would they put some capital and preorder into IDMR? Because people want to watch what THEY want, when THEY want. Even if you consider the possibility of live content, you should indeed look at radio. You can listen to a live stream of huge numbers of radio stations from around the world. If I want to listen to WBCR-LP (a low power community station in Gt. Barrington, Massachusetts) I can tune in easily. It makes no sense to feed it over multicast, as it's doubtful there's more than a handful of others anywhere topographically (network-wise) near me to make it make sense to have routers handling multicast for this stream. The point is the more possible live content there is, the less multicast makes sense. Compounding this, fewer people care to watch live content, preferring instead to record and watch later on their own schedule, or be served on-demand. In this usage model, multicast is not helpful either. > All you need is someone like Cisco to team with who can produce a network > consumer DVD player capable of assuming the roll of a physical tivo box, > say something like the kiss technology DP-600 box (cisco bought kiss last > year) that the MPAA loves so much (MPAA bought thousands of them for their > own purposes) and presto things are suddenly taking a whole new shape and > direction. There may be a dark horse, but I doubt it'll be IDMR. A more likely one, IMO, is cache stuffing by statistical approximation... what I mean by this is best explained by example... the satellite providers could add broadband connectivity to their boxes (the Dish receiver we have does indeed have an Ethernet port, so this isn't difficult to imagine). Where the boxes could use the broadband connection to pull demand content, the higher bandwidth of the satellite link could be used to push the most likely requested content to the hard drives of receivers. Hybrid demand and prediction is just a guess of where we're headed, of course. > So now you get a choice, buy a new HD TV tuner or buy a new DVD player that > does standard or HD tv even after the over the air broadcast change happens > in the US. Dish has a button that advances 30 seconds per click. Only way to watch anything these days is to have control to fast forward. Better yet, just shoot your TV and read a book. The entertainment value is greater, and it's a lot more energy efficient.
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