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

Thu Mar 26 14:18:53 UTC 2009

Alexander Harrowell wrote:
> 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.
>>
>>
>>     
>
>   
I wonder how products like this will figure into the mix.

http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/new-tech-could-make-consoles-obsolete/1299562