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.