Webcasting as a replacement for traditional broadcasting (was Re: Wackie 'ol Friday)

Fri Jun 7 15:53:50 UTC 2013

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Painter" <tvhawaii at shaka.com>

> Anyone besides jra remember the last Super Bowl?
> Better this year? Worse?
> I'm sure whomever is listening in would like to know as well.
> 
> http://www.multichannel.com/blogs/translation-please/multicast-unicast-and-super-bowl-problem

Well, in fact, the most recent Massive Failure was the webcast of the 
Concert For Boston, on 5/31.  They were using a vendor called LiveAlliance.tv,
who did not appear to be farming it out to Limelight or Akamai or Youtube, as
far as I could tell, and they apparently only figured for a scale 5 audience,
and then got more than 500k attempts.

They got rescued by a vendor named Fast Hockey who are an amateur hockey
webcast aggregator, I gather, and *are* an Akamai client.

My estimation is that the reason that webcasting will never completely
replace broadcasting is that -- because it is mostly unicast -- its
inherent complexity factor is a) orders of magnitude higher than bcast, and
b) *proportional to the number of viewers*.  Like Linux, that doesn't scale.

And broadcasters are not prone to think of the world in a view where you
have to provide technical support to people just to watch your show.

"He's at the 40... the 30... the 20... this is gonna be the Super Bowl, 
folks... the 10... [buffering]"

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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