Broadcast television in an IP world

Tue Nov 21 18:12:00 UTC 2017

On Tue Nov 21, 2017 at 09:09:06AM -0600, Mike Hammett wrote:
> Unicasting what everyone watches live on a random evening would
> use significantly more bandwidth than Game of Thrones or whatever
> OTT drop. Magnitudes more. It wouldn't even be in the same ballpark. 

In the UK our VoD (branded iPlayer) is approx 5% of consumption, the
rest is linear broadcast channels. While we're planning for the day
it is 100% IP there is quite a lot to do before we get there.

One thing we've tested is the DASM extension to DASH streaming to allow
clients to transparently consume unicast or multicast. Most would be
unicast consumers but some networks use multicast for tv channel
delivery. This allows their clients to adapt (and mix so for rewind
can switch to unicast, the watch this live programme from the beginning
buttton is quite popular) rather than having a different client (lots
of caveats in there)

Today our CDNs would not handle a popular programme with a 15M
audience. They could be scaled up and some ISPs have placed CDN nodes
closer to their edge to help that. Others already have internal
multicast or are working on it. We'll use whatever works best.

brandon