Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

Sat Jan 6 15:44:31 UTC 2007

On Jan 6, 2007, at 10:19 AM, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:

>
> On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 09:09:19AM -0600, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
>> 2.  The question I don't understand is, why stream?
>
> There are other good reasons, but fundamentally; because of live
> telivision.
>
>> In these days, when a terabyte disk for consumer PCs is about to be
>> introduced, why bother with streaming?  It is so much simpler to
>> download (at faster than real-time rates, if possible), and play it
>> back.
>
> That might be worse for download operators, because people may  
> download
> an hour of video, and only watch 5 minutes :/
>

Our logs show that, for every 100 people who start to watch a stream,  
only 2 or 5 % watch over
30 minutes in one sitting, even for VOD where they presumably have  
some interest in the movie up front, and
more more than 9% will watch all of VOD movie, even over multiple  
viewings. This is also very consistent
with time, but I don't have any pretty plots handy. (Our cumulative  
audience in 2006 was 2.74 million people, I have lots of statistics.)

So, from that standpoint, making a video file available for download  
is wasting order of 90% of the bandwidth used
to download it.

Regards
Marshall

> -- 
> Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm 
> +pgp at stdlib.net