The scale of streaming video on the Internet.

Thu Dec 2 20:48:29 UTC 2010

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell at ufp.org>
>[...] 
> That's an interesting number, but let's run back the other way.
> Consider what happens if folks cut the cord, and watch Internet
> only TV. I went and found some TV ratings:
> 
> http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/30/tv-ratings-broadcast-top-25-sunday-night-football-dancing-with-the-stars-finale-two-and-a-half-men-ncis-top-week-10-viewing/73784
> 
> Sunday Night Football at the top last week, with 7.1% of US homes
> watching. That's over 23 times as many folks watching as the 0.3% in
> our previous math! Ok, 23 times 150Gbps.
> 
> 3.45Tb/s.
> 
> Yowzer. That's a lot of data. 345 10GE ports for a SINGLE TV show.
> 
> But that's 7.1% of homes, so scale up to 100% of homes and you get
> 48Tb/sec, that's right 4830 simultaneous 10GE's if all of Comcast's
> existing high speed subs dropped cable and watched the same shows over
> the Internet.
> 
> I think we all know that streaming video is large. Putting the real
> numbers to it shows the real engineering challenges on both sides,
> generating and sinking the content, and why companies are fighting so
> much over it.

It also proves, though I doubt anyone important is listening, *why the
network broadcast architecture is shaped the way it is*, and it implies,
*to* anyone important who is listening, just how bad a fit that is for
a point- or even multi-point server to viewers environment.

Oh: and all the extra servers and switches necessary to set that up?

*Way* more power than the equivalent transmitters and TV sets.  Even if 
you add in the cable headends, I suspect.

In other news: viewers will tolerate Buffering... to watch last night's
daily show.  They will *not* tolerate it while they're waiting to see if
the winning hit in Game 7 is fair or foul -- which means that it will 
not be possible to replace that architecture until you can do it at 
technical parity... and that's not to mention the emergency communications
uses of "real" broadcasting, which will become untenable if enough 
critical mass is drained off of said "real broadcasting" by other 
services which are only Good Enough.

The Law of Unexpected Consequences is a *bitch*.  Just ask the NCS people;
I'm sure they have some interesting 40,000ft stories to tell about the
changes in the telco networks since 1983.

Cheers,
-- jra