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

Wed May 25 00:12:31 UTC 2011

Was PBS one of the companies you are referring to?  A colleague of
mine worked as a developer on a project at PBS in the 90s that used
the blanking interval for Internet transmissio - very cool stuff.

On 5/19/11, Robert Bonomi <bonomi at mail.r-bonomi.com> wrote:
>> From nanog-bounces+bonomi=mail.r-bonomi.com at nanog.org  Wed May 18 16:12:17
>> 2011
>> Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 14:53:10 -0600
>> From: Brielle Bruns <bruns at 2mbit.com>
>> To: nanog at nanog.org
>> Subject: Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than
>> Any
>> 	Other Company
>>
>> On 5/18/11 2:33 PM, Dorn Hetzel wrote:
>> > If we're really talking efficiency, the "popular" stuff should probably
>> > stream out over the bird of your choice (directv, etc) because it's
>> > hard to beat millions of dishes and dvr's and no cable plant.
>> >
>> > Then what won't fit on the bird goes unicast IP from the nearest CDN.
>> > Kind of like the "on demand over broadband" on my satellite box.  Their
>> > selection sucks, but the model is valid.
>>
>>
>>
>> If someone hadn't mentioned already, there used to be a usenet provider
>> that delivered a full feed via Satellite.
>
> There were, at different times, two companies that did that.  Both went
> under because expenses exceeded income.
>
> The one that was _much_ more interesting was the one that Lauren Weinstein
> had a hand in.  It piggy-backed a Usenet feed in the vertical blanking
> interval of several big "independant" TV stations -- ones that were
> carried by practically every cable company in the country.  Distribution
> to the cable companies was via satellite, but the USENET feed, being
> _part_ of the video signal, consumed _zero_ additional bandwidth, and
> rode the satellite links for free.
>
> To get the feed, all you needed was a TV tuner with 'video out', and the
> purpose-huilt decoder box that extracted the vertical interval data.
>
> This service died as the independants moved to encrypted transmission,
> because the encryption did _not_ perserve anything in the 'blanking'
> timeslot. only the 'viewable' field-image was trasmitted, _as_ a full-field
> image.  Sync, blanking, etc. was _locally_ generated on the receiving end.
>
> An "elegant" idea, done in by changing technology.   *sigh*
>
>
>
>