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

Thu May 19 09:39:58 UTC 2011

I think most the points made here are valid about why it isn't an easy
problem to solve with multicast.
Lets say for instance they had a multicast stream that sent the most popular
content (which to Randy's point may not cover much) and 48 hours of that
stream was cached locally on the CPE. What is the additional cost to expand
each of these CPE's to handle this? Will it be HD or SD or both? Are people
willing to Sacrafice their Xbox and PS3 disk space? Does the $60 Roku become
the $400 Roku? Does securing all the content then become more difficult?
What is the hard drive failure rate of these devices with them constantly
writing to disk?

What incentive do users have to to shell out the money for a device that
will handle this caching? Multicasting this type of content seems to create
more problems than it solves.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> > why not permit your users to subscribe to shows/instances, stream them
> > on-demand for viewing later... and leave truly live content
> > (news/sports/etc) as is, with only the ability to pause/rewind?
> >
> > how is this different from broadcast tv today though?
>
> for some of us, the thing that is wonderful about netflix is the long
> tail.  my tastes are a sigma or three out.
>
> randy
>
>