Mark Cuban has published an aggressive blog post about video over the internet.
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/
His argument is that video over the net is not viable because the current state of technology cannot support that massive numbers of simultaneous viewers the cable or satellite.
While that statement is true, it does not paint the whole picture. If you look at the content delivered by cable, most of it pre-recorded. It does not matter when you watch programs on The History Channel.
A background download of The History Channel makes perfect sense in that context. Add a little smarts to it, like always keep three episodes downloaded and you negate the CDN bandwidth issue.
Look at the Tivo model. People became very accustomed to the time shift. In that model, the device had to wait for another broadcast to record. In a pure download environment, the new episode is replaced when it is most convenient.
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Hi Dan, just sharing my last post in Mark Cuban blog with this rational, I hope you find it usefull ;-)
ReplyDeleteBtw, I work for a local telco supporting ip multicast in our IP backbonne so is more than unicast vs broadcast even..;-)
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Hi Mark, Martin from Argentina here.. we have some talks in a Streaming Media event some years ago..
I think your point is not fair as Internet is more one to one (unicast) and Cable/TV is about one to many (aka broadcast ;-).
You can find this point naive, but is not really! I will answer why ...
I will take the Argentina case as is my home country and is the second country in the world with high CableTV penetration so the rational in numbers per inhabitants scale to US numbers for sure.
The rational:
Any CableTV network has only 1 GigaHerz analog downstream bandwith, with a very tini capacity in upstrem direction, even with DOCSIS 3.0- and if you translates this GigaHZ to bits is about 3 Gigabits per second, with the edge technology of next future.
So the there is not really a bandwith per user figure as this bandwith is shared between cable subscribers, you can add as total cable subs x 3 Gbps... as all cable subs almost receive the same bits as cable tv is a broadcast network...
So here are a litle more than 4 million cable subs, all receiving the same 85 broadcasts channels ;-)
THE AGGREGATE CABLE BANDWITH is not 4 millions x 3Gbps (12 petabits per second !!) IS JUST 85 channels of 6mhz each or more digital at 85 ch times 2Mbps, as 2+ meg is what you need actually for SD tv, so ABOUT 200 mega bit per second, no?
Here in Argentina THE INTERNET AGGREGATE BROADBAND BANDWITH now (may 2009) is 120 giga bits per second.
How much? 120 Gbps ! - as we have almost 4 millions broadband users with 3/4 players (2 telcos / 2 cables) and this figure is growing at 100% annual rate since 1999, so by next years will be 240 Gpbs or so. 1000 times in 10 years (moore's law applied to bandwith...;-)
This 120 Gbps is one to one unicast, half of them video.
(also half of them is generated in P2P overlay networks as bittorrent).
So the average volumen per month here is about 6 Gbytes per user per month, equivalent to 12 hours of SD video per month.
If you want compare the power of internet you can compare 120 Gbps from broadband to 200 mbps in cable!!!
And compare cable broadband to others broadband networks (DSL /3G / Wimax/etc)
not make sense compare broadcast to broadband!!!
Internet can deliber efectively trillons of channels, blogs, webpages, voip calls, games, web portal sites, emails, and so son and so on.. is not more about all consuming the same, is not about pop culture, is not about rating figures, is more about long tail as chris Anderson wrote some years ago...
at the end, what is the meaning of send hundreds of tv channels to each households when in each household wil only display one to 3 channels at time?, not time shifting, no place shifting, not VOD
til next, Martin