death of the net predicted by deloitte -- film at 11

Mon Feb 12 03:02:08 UTC 2007

At 02:57 PM 2/11/2007, Paul Vixie wrote:

> > Has anyone considered that perhaps google is not looking at beating
> > Microsoft but instead at beating TIVO, ABC, CBS, Warner Cable, etc?
>
>sure, but...
>
> > You can't possibly believe that there is enough bandwidth to stream
> > HD video to everyone, that's just not going to happen any time soon.
>
>...wouldn't there be, if interdomain multicast existed and had a billing
>model that could lead to a compelling business model?  right now, to the
>best of my knowledge, all large multicast flows are still intradomain.

IP Multicast as a solution to video distribution is a non-starter. IP 
Multicast for the wide area is a failure. It assumes large numbers of 
people will watch the same content at the same time. The usage model 
that could work for it most mimics the broadcast environment before 
cable TV, when there were anywhere from three to ten channels to 
choose from, and everyone watched one of those. That model has not 
made sense in a long time. The proponents of IP Multicast seem to 
have failed to notice this.

>so if tivo and the others wanted to deliver all that crap using IP, would
>they do what broadcast.com did (lots of splitter/repeater stations), or
>do what google is presumably doing (lots of fiber), or would they put
>some capital and preorder into IDMR?

Because people want to watch what THEY want, when THEY want. Even if 
you consider the possibility of live content, you should indeed look 
at radio. You can listen to a live stream of huge numbers of radio 
stations from around the world. If I want to listen to WBCR-LP (a low 
power community station in Gt. Barrington, Massachusetts) I can tune 
in easily. It makes no sense to feed it over multicast, as it's 
doubtful there's more than a handful of others anywhere 
topographically (network-wise) near me to make it make sense to have 
routers handling multicast for this stream. The point is the more 
possible live content there is, the less multicast makes sense. 
Compounding this, fewer people care to watch live content, preferring 
instead to record and watch later on their own schedule, or be served 
on-demand. In this usage model, multicast is not helpful either.

> > All you need is someone like Cisco to team with who can produce a network
> > consumer DVD player capable of assuming the roll of a physical tivo box,
> > say something like the kiss technology DP-600 box (cisco bought kiss last
> > year) that the MPAA loves so much (MPAA bought thousands of them for their
> > own purposes) and presto things are suddenly taking a whole new shape and
> > direction.
>
>yeah.  sadly, that seems like the inevitable direction for the market leaders
>and disruptors.  but i still wonder if a dark horse like IDMR can still emerge
>among the followers and incumbents (or the next-gen disruptors)?

There may be a dark horse, but I doubt it'll be IDMR. A more likely 
one, IMO, is cache stuffing by statistical approximation... what I 
mean by this is best explained by example... the satellite providers 
could add broadband connectivity to their boxes (the Dish receiver we 
have does indeed have an Ethernet port, so this isn't difficult to 
imagine). Where the boxes could use the broadband connection to pull 
demand content, the higher bandwidth of the satellite link could be 
used to push the most likely requested content to the hard drives of 
receivers. Hybrid demand and prediction is just a guess of where 
we're headed, of course.

> > So now you get a choice, buy a new HD TV tuner or buy a new DVD player that
> > does standard or HD tv even after the over the air broadcast change happens
> > in the US.
>
>at some point tivo will disable my fast-forward button and i'll give up
>network TV altogether.  irritatingly, hundreds of millions of others will
>not.  but we digress.

Dish has a button that advances 30 seconds per click. Only way to 
watch anything these days is to have control to fast forward. Better 
yet, just shoot your TV and read a book. The entertainment value is 
greater, and it's a lot more energy efficient. 