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

Tue Feb 13 05:37:22 UTC 2007

On Mon, 12 Feb 2007, Peter Beckman wrote:

> NBC can now stream their shows to me as a .mp4 and I could grab them as
> fast as they could send it, rather than in realtime.  They might offer the
> same stream at different data rates: 1mbps, 5mbps, 10mbps, 30mbps (for
> those of us lucky enough to have Verizon FIOS at home).  The streams would
> simply repeat once they streamed all the files in a list.

That is what layered IPmc is.  There is a base stream and on top of that 
additional "layers" are interleaved and you pick up just what you need - 
depending on your b/w.  There are other facets to layered IPmc such as 
staggered streams, whereby the same VOD is transmitted 10x an hour, at 6 
minute intervals and using clever encoding you "tap" into the multicast 
stream and within an average of 3 minutes your VOD starts playing - at the 
level of quality based on your available b/w.

I've seen this in action as far back as 1998 and just don't quite grok why 
it never took off.

-Hank