is this like a peering war somehow?

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Fri Jan 20 16:25:40 UTC 2006


On Jan 20, 2006, at 11:16 AM, Joe Abley wrote:

> Perhaps this additional networking complexity (and hence cost, at  
> some level, presumably) will allow peoples' eyes to be opened to  
> the fact that the majority of television being viewed over the  
> Internet today is done asynchronously, through peer-to-peer, file- 
> sharing networks.
>
> It amuses me to think of early-adopting consumers receiving all  
> their expensive, network-optimised television shows in real-time on  
> their TiVOs, only to have them recorded to disk and watched days  
> later. (Recorded onto hard disks with no DRM, no less, ready to be  
> encoded and uploaded to eDonkey :-)
>
> If content distribution companies would accept this as the final  
> outcome, then sticking a torrent client on the set-top-box and  
> feeding it from an RSS feed starts to seem a lot cheaper than  
> encumbering every access network with traffic shaping.

Agreed - mostly.

Things like sports events will still require real-time feeds, and  
people will pay for them.  But satellite seems like a perfectly  
reasonable and cost-efficient means of distribution without going  
through anyone's right-of-way.

I mean, seriously, do you think anyone is going to WAIT to see  
Victoria's Secret Fashion Show? :-)

-- 
TTFN,
patrick



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