The scale of streaming video on the Internet.

Fri Dec 3 16:31:27 UTC 2010

On Dec 3, 2010, at 9:16 AM, Neil Harris wrote:

> On 02/12/10 20:21, Leo Bicknell wrote:
>> Comcast has around ~15 million high speed Internet subscribers (based on
>> year old data, I'm sure it is higher), which means at peak usage around
>> 0.3% of all Comcast high speed users would be watching.
>> 
>> That's an interesting number, but let's run back the other way.
>> Consider what happens if folks cut the cord, and watch Internet
>> only TV.  I went and found some TV ratings:
>> 
>> http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/30/tv-ratings-broadcast-top-25-sunday-night-football-dancing-with-the-stars-finale-two-and-a-half-men-ncis-top-week-10-viewing/73784
>> 
>> Sunday Night Football at the top last week, with 7.1% of US homes
>> watching.  That's over 23 times as many folks watching as the 0.3% in
>> our previous math!  Ok, 23 times 150Gbps.
>> 
>> 3.45Tb/s.
>> 
>> Yowzer.  That's a lot of data.  345 10GE ports for a SINGLE TV show.
>> 
>> But that's 7.1% of homes, so scale up to 100% of homes and you get
>> 48Tb/sec, that's right 4830 simultaneous 10GE's if all of Comcast's
>> existing high speed subs dropped cable and watched the same shows over
>> the Internet.
>> 
>> I think we all know that streaming video is large.  Putting the real
>> numbers to it shows the real engineering challenges on both sides,
>> generating and sinking the content, and why comapnies are fighting so
>> much over it.
>> 
>>   
> 
> You might be interested in the EU-funded P2P-NEXT research initiative, which is creating a P2P system capable of handling P2P broadcasting at massive scale:
> 
> http://www.p2p-next.org/

This already exists in China. 

http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/77/slides/P2PRG-3.pdf

Regards
Marshall

> 
> -- Neil
> 
> (full disclosure: I'm associated with one of the participants in the project)
> 
> 
> 