Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company

Wed May 18 20:30:28 UTC 2011

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
>> why not permit your users to subscribe to shows/instances, stream them
>> on-demand for viewing later... and leave truly live content
>> (news/sports/etc) as is, with only the ability to pause/rewind?
>>
>> how is this different from broadcast tv today though?
>
> for some of us, the thing that is wonderful about netflix is the long
> tail.  my tastes are a sigma or three out.

usenet is over ->

in all seriousness, if the content was available and you could request
it be streamed to you 'sometime tomorrow' or 'sometime before Friday',
you and the other people like you coudl get serviced on a singular
'stream'.  I suspect that the vast majority of content is in the 1st
sigma... and again, servicing everyone with a limited number of
multicast'd streams seems like it would be nice. even falling back to
unicast for some set of mathematically/cost-conscious examples seems
like a win here.