I think most the points made here are valid about why it isn't an easy problem to solve with multicast. Lets say for instance they had a multicast stream that sent the most popular content (which to Randy's point may not cover much) and 48 hours of that stream was cached locally on the CPE. What is the additional cost to expand each of these CPE's to handle this? Will it be HD or SD or both? Are people willing to Sacrafice their Xbox and PS3 disk space? Does the $60 Roku become the $400 Roku? Does securing all the content then become more difficult? What is the hard drive failure rate of these devices with them constantly writing to disk? What incentive do users have to to shell out the money for a device that will handle this caching? Multicasting this type of content seems to create more problems than it solves. On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
why not permit your users to subscribe to shows/instances, stream them on-demand for viewing later... and leave truly live content (news/sports/etc) as is, with only the ability to pause/rewind?
how is this different from broadcast tv today though?
for some of us, the thing that is wonderful about netflix is the long tail. my tastes are a sigma or three out.
randy