The 100 Gbit/s problem in your network

Tue Feb 12 01:11:26 UTC 2013

> > Multicast _is_ useful for filling the millions of DVRs out there with
> > broadcast programs and for live events (eg. sports).  A smart VOD =
> system
> > would have my DVR download the entire program from a local cache--and
> > then play it locally as with anything else I watch.  Those caches =
> could
> > be populated by multicast as well, at least for popular content.  The
> > long tail would still require some level of unicast distribution, but
> > that is _by definition_ a tiny fraction of total demand.
> 
> One of us has a different dictionary than everyone else.
> 
> Assume I have 10 million movies in my library, and 10 million active =
> users.  Further assume there are 10 movies being watched by 100K users =
> each, and 9,999,990 movies which are being watched by 1 user each.
> 
> Which has more total demand, the 10 popular movies or the long tail?
> 
> This doesn't mean Netflix or Hulu or iTunes or whatever has the =
> aforementioned demand curve.  But it does mean my "definition" & yours =
> do not match.
> 
> Either way, I challenge you to prove the long tail on one of the serious =
> streaming services is a "tiny fraction" of total demand.

Think I have to agree with Patrick here, even if the facts were not to
support him at this time.

The real question is: how will video evolve?

Multicast is ideally suited for small numbers of streams being delivered
to wide numbers of viewers.  The broadcast television distribution model
worked well when only a large conglomerate could afford to produce video.

Around thirty years ago, improvements in technology made it possible 
and reasonable for municipal cable TV systems to generate local programs.

About fifteen(?) years ago, TiVo made waves with DVR's, which introduced
a disruptive concept to the existing paradigm.

Then ten years ago, video cameras and computer editing made it vaguely
possible for a service like YouTube to evolve to serve low quality
video over the low speed broadband of the day.

Now?  I can shoot 1080p 30fps video on my phone, edit it on a modest
computer, and post it on the Internet easily.  With relatively cheap
hardware.

But a lot of people still watch network or cable TV.  And the thing I
have to think is, there's going to be a battle between Big Content,
who would prefer to be able to produce shows watched by lots of people
(and which works for multicast), and smaller specialty content producers
who will be enabled by the ease of inexpensive Internet distribution.

This battle has been fought in the shadows until now, because there are
not any totally awesome ways for video to be distributed to end users.
Someone will invent something like InterneTiVo, which will do for 
Internet video what TiVo did for OTA/cable/satellite - make it easy to
find the things you'd like to watch, and handle the details of getting
them for you.

But here's the thing.  There's a growing number of people who are 
taking the new generation of Smart TV's and/or the smart little boxes
like AppleTV, and optionally combining it with the cheap and readily 
available storage options (or just relying on the speed of broadband)
to be able to download and watch what they want, when they want.

For our household, the computation came out to: do we continue to pay
DirecTV $80/month plus the $3(?) annual rate increase they had done
every single year?  We were happy when we started with them at $30/mo
and would probably have been willing to pay that forever.  But at $80,
that's $960/year, and with 21 series that we watched on a semi-regular
basis, which we could purchase and own for an average of less than $40
per season, that's only $840 per year, assuming that all the series 
put out one season per year (a false assumption these days anyways).

I've talked about this to a number of people who were startled to
discover that their own TV economics did not make sense.  The big
thing that prevents many people from doing this is just that it's so
"different."

Broadband providers here in the US have been reluctant to keep up
with providing contemporary, industry-leading speeds, which is the
other big thing to wrestle with.  As network speeds increase, the
value of multicast will decrease.

So my point is this: to me, it really seems like worrying about video
loads on networks (in terms of multicast vs unicast) is going to be
a diminishing returns sort of thing: broadband networks are going to
be getting faster eventually, the potential number of video sources
is going to continue to grow, the diversity of what people wish to 
view is going to continue to grow, the number of types of video 
devices is going to increase, and the difficulty of causing any sort
of standard implemented on a massive installed base is going to make
adoption of multicast for the purpose largely irrelevant.

In the long run, it's probable that nothing will change that.  There
will continue to be a large amount of content that could be multicast
(movies, live sports, etc) but I really expect to see CDN's take on
that load instead of introducing multicast to the mix...  and in the
meantime I hope someone invents InterneTiVo to find all the other
great content.

Multicast would be great, if someone would have figured out a good
way to deploy it early on...  but at this late point, the horse is
out of the barn.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.