Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company

Wed May 18 20:16:01 UTC 2011

On 2011-05-18, at 16:09, Dorn Hetzel wrote:

> they can capture popular programs at the time of multicast for later
> viewing.  Whether this is better than capturing the same programs over a
> broadcast medium for later playback, I don't know...

... or a peer to peer medium, which is (as I understand it) how people who really want this to happen today manage to do it. The problem is not the distribution so much as the need to shoe-horn this network efficiency into the content business model.

I heard similar stories about the early days of distributing digital copies of movies to theatres for presentation -- the technology was trivial, even with fairly low-power commodity CPUs, until you insist that the content be encrypted so that nobody can walk off with it without paying.

Joe