Netflix, Blockbuster, and streaming content ... what impact?

Thu Mar 26 14:05:17 UTC 2009

The UK has already had this experience in early 2008 when the BBC began
making huge amounts of TV content available through its iPlayer project. The
impact on the DSL ISP industry was..not pretty. Our company did quite a bit
of analysis on the results:
http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/02/bbcs_iplayer_nukes_all_you_can.html
http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/04/bbc_its_paymasters_cutting_the.html
http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/06/no_video_really_has_killed_the.html
http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/07/online_video_scoreboard_youtub.html
http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/08/bbc_iplayer_bandwidth_wars.html

Essentially, if you're dependent on bitstream or on monopoly/near monopoly
backhaul, you're in for an interesting few years. Answers: encourage peering
with content providers, push CDNs as far into the network as possible, look
at using set-top boxes creatively (local caching, integrated delivery with
satellite/broadcast/cable).

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:

> I've been seeing a flurry of new streaming service offerings, proposed or
> actual, such as Netflix, where it appears that they may be shooting to
> eventually ditch the mailed-DVD approach and just do broadband delivery of
> content.  Might be a ways off, but they're doing the streaming now.
>
> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&refer=&sid=a1zxwiC6ELnA
>
> So we're potentially talking 4Mbps streamed at a customer for 2 hours at
> a shot, 500KB/s, 3.6GB of data.
>
> I know I've mentioned this several times in the past as a "coming
> challenge," and various parties, including many of our Australian
> networking friends, have expressed skepticism (and implemented
> quotas, etc).  Yet it seems ever more certain that we're going to be
> seeing an explosion of video over the Internet, and sooner or later
> our rural areas, and all of the Australians ( :-) ), won't want to
> feel like left-out, second-rate Internet users.
>
> I see the current situation as being a gateway of sorts.  Clearly,
> there are fortunes to be made and fortunes to be lost on this sort
> of thing, and I suspect that if some company is successful at this
> sort of streaming, we'll suddenly see a lot more business plans
> that involve Internet video delivery.
>
> This would seem to present some challenges to networks today, and
> probably more in the future.  This would seem to be a pivotal time of
> sorts, are our networks planning to meet this challenge by providing
> the capacity, or are we going to degrade or limit service, or ... ???
> What are networks doing today about these issues?
>
> ... JG
> --
> Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
> "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then
> I
> won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail
> spam(CNN)
> With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many
> apples.
>
>