How do you put a TV station on the Mbone? (was: Royal Wedding...)

Dan White dwhite at olp.net
Fri Apr 29 18:47:49 UTC 2011


On 29/04/11 14:04 -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>On Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:48:51 EDT, Jay Ashworth said:
>> Will they not complain about having their equipment utilization go up
>> with no recompense -- for something that is only of benefit to commercial
>> customers of some other entity?
>
>Like their load didn't go up with no recompense this morning.

For what it's worth, we didn't see much of bump this morning on our
broadband network... maybe a 10-15% spike (and non-peak hours at that).

>What's the break-even point, the number of streams being sent at once where
>multicasting it starts taking less resources than N unicast streams?

Video distribution is bound to continue to go in the direction of
Netflix/Youtube where ISPs are going to be highly motivated to find cheaper
ways to provide internet content to their end users. And directly peered,
multicast agreements between CDNs and ISPs are going to be a real quick way
to chop operational costs. Even if that doesn't apply to Netflix content
today, it's bound to matter for content that consumers are going to want to
consume in real time (sporting events).

 From the perspective of an ISP operating in a small market, we are seeing a
big shift in usage toward Netflix and netflix-like services that is
necessarily going to change the model of how we provide internet services.
We have limited access to CDN or Content-Producer peering agreements (that
would help to save costs) and, even if we did, we're in no position to
demand ingress cash flow in those agreements (not enough eyeballs!). Since
our users are the ones with the business arrangements with Netflix, and since
their demand is shifting in that direction, I'd imagine we'd jump at a
chance for private multicast agreements, even if demand didn't quite
warrant it at this point.



-- 
Dan White




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