From nanog-bounces+bonomi=mail.r-bonomi.com@nanog.org Tue May 24 22:19:18 2011 Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 23:14:56 -0400 (EDT) From: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Morrow" <morrowc.lists@gmail.com>
On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:48 PM, Lou Katz <lou@metron.com> wrote:
An "elegant" idea, done in by changing technology. *sigh*
As USENIX director I sponsored and sheparded this project, called "Stargate". We at least got bits into the blanking interval at WTBS in Altanta.
So... would this have been feasible today? given the bandwidth required to send a full feed these days, i suspect likely not, eh? (even if you were able to do it on all 500+ channels in parallel)
I can't tell you whether it would be feasible from a *quantity* standpoint unless you specify what your group list is -- big 7 text? Probably.
Problem is, it depended (as he noted) on a peculiarity of the network TV environment at the time: it wasn't part of the signal, but of the *transport* which -- at the time -- was carried around along with the signal, so you could piggyback stuff there, and get it right to people's TVs. MPEG2 and 4 don't carry the vertical interval, so any ride you can get isn't free -- rather similar to our Multicast discussion last week.
Back in the really bad old days, I'm told that the most stable frequency source the average civilian could get was the 3.58MHz oscillator in a color TV set -- but *only* when you were watching *network* programs, at which time that oscillator was effectively phase-locked to a $50k+ black burst generator at network master control.
Frame synchronizers shot that plan out of the water.
Never been sure if that's apocryphal or not.
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274