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

Thu May 19 09:53:35 UTC 2011

> From: Rick Astley [mailto:jnanog at gmail.com]
> 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.

Lots of people already cache multicast streams to disk at home. I have a Humax digital TV cache (PVR ;-) that caches HD and SD content for me automatically. 

Doing the same over a network is not that much more of a jump really. My Humax box already has Ethernet to my home network, grabbing a multicast feed is no more than a software feature.

So in a way people already pay to do just this. 

Indeed, in the UK, SKY offer a movies service which I believe you can cache locally if you have a SKY+ thing. So, SKY do it now and people pay for it.

--
Leigh

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