Sunday traffic curiosity

Mon Mar 23 17:14:18 UTC 2020

On 23/Mar/20 05:51, Owen DeLong wrote:

> How do you see that happening? Are people going to stop wanting to watch live,
> or are teams going to somehow play asynchronously (e.g. Lakers vs. Celtics,
> the Lakers play on November 5 at 6 PM and the Celtics play on November 8
> at 11 AM)?
>
> Further, it would be more accurate to say that events with large live audiences
> are the only thing propping up the “old economy” and sport is probably by far
> the largest current application of live streaming.

I'll admit, this is not an easy one to solve.

The problem you have is the kids who are driving the new economy have
little to no interest in live sport. Old timers like ourselves still
like watching live sport, and even better, betting on it for those who
consider that an extra sport of sport. The kids are not into all of
that, and despite the growth of online sporting conventions (eSports,
Fortnite tournaments, Twitch binging, e.t.c.), it doesn't even register
as a rounding-error on the balance sheets of the traditional sports
establishment. To you pysch. majors, that means, "We - the old guard -
don't care about any of that :-)".

Linear TV networks know that most homes moving to VoD would prefer a
sports-only package, so that they can pick that up from them and keep
movies and series on VoD. However, the linear TV networks are leveraging
that to keep pushing their traditional bouquets because then they have
the justification to "charge that little bit extra" in order to deliver
all the other content that sits side-by-side with sports.

As I've been saying before, the Coronavirus has amplified and
accelerated the realization that the old economy will not survive in
this new digital era. As this applies to sport, Formula One have
cancelled a heap of grand prix weekends this season, but this has forced
them to, for the first time, hold eSports options, just this week:

https://www.grandprix247.com/2020/03/23/zhou-wins-virtual-bahrain-grand-prix/

Is that a sign of things to come, yes and no. "No" in that there is
simply too much money with the traditional setup to put aside for the
bigger picture, but "Yes" in that during times like these, there might
be way for folk to get their fix, unless you are a  purist. But even
then, how long can you hold out for if another pandemic in 20 years
loses us 2 whole years?

One could speak of hybrid solutions where you watch linear TV, but then
engage with the match/program online. In 2013, I saw a number of
equipment vendors developing walled-garden solutions around this, and it
was great. But as we all know, the kids gravitate to simpler solutions
that offer obvious value, are downloadable from a public market store,
and cost zero. So now, watching anything on TV means engaging via
Twitter, not via some walled-garden app only open to a few, ships with a
price tag, and crashes more than it is usable.

In South Africa, our incumbent pay-TV provider is trialing offering some
pre-dated sports content (amongst other channels) available for free
(and only) online, as streamed live TV:

http://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/378021/dstv-offers-free-channels-and-shows-for-south-africans-while-staying-at-home

This is both on the back of the Coronavirus, but also to trial options
to satisfy those who don't want all the channels they offer, but just
sports.

Where all the VoD providers are letting linear TV networks keep running
away with this model is by all of them chasing us to give them our
US$10/month for what they feel is the killer VoD service in the world.
As I've mentioned before on this list, consumer fatigue due to the
"yet-another-new-VoD-provider-today" syndrome is growing. For as long as
each VoD provider is competing for our business, linear TV will remain
relevant because it's easier and cheaper for a consumer to give a linear
TV provider one cheque that covers a variety of channels, vs. paying
US$10/month for every VoD provider. And now major sports events and/or
channels are also in the VoD game, each of them also charging
US$10/month. It starts to add up pretty quick, and in the end, the case
for linear TV is only strengthened.

If linear TV is going to enter the new economy (especially to hit the
kids), current VoD services are going to have to figure out how to
aggregate. And if they don't, we all know who the one left standing is
more likely to be :-).

So let's keep watching this "linear TV for sports" thing develop. I hope
to provide better insight in about a year :-).

>
> Remember, this discussion started with a question about live-streaming church
> services.
>
> In the “new normal” of a COVID lockdown world, with the huge increase in
> teleconferencing, etc. there may well be additional audiences for many-to-many
> multicast that aren’t currently implemented.
>
> IMO, the only sane way to do this also helps solve the v4/v6 conferencing question.
>
> Local Aggregation Points (LAPs) are anycast customer terminations. Backbone between
> LAPs supports IPv6-only and IPv6 multicast (intra-domain only). LAPs are not sharing
> routing table space with backbone routers. Likely some tunnel mechanism is used to
> link LAPs to each other to shield backbone routers from multicast state information.
>
> Each “session” (whether an individual chat, group chat, etc.) gets a unique IPv6
> multicast group. Each LAP with at least one user logged into a given session will
> join that multicast group across the backbone. Users connects to LAPs via unicast.
> If voice, video, slide, chat streams need to be separated, use different port numbers
> to do that.

Perhaps I'm biased, but while there might be a model, I don't think
Multicast is the tool to drive it.

Mark.
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