On 29/04/11 14:04 -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:48:51 EDT, Jay Ashworth said:
Will they not complain about having their equipment utilization go up with no recompense -- for something that is only of benefit to commercial customers of some other entity?
Like their load didn't go up with no recompense this morning.
For what it's worth, we didn't see much of bump this morning on our broadband network... maybe a 10-15% spike (and non-peak hours at that).
What's the break-even point, the number of streams being sent at once where multicasting it starts taking less resources than N unicast streams?
Video distribution is bound to continue to go in the direction of Netflix/Youtube where ISPs are going to be highly motivated to find cheaper ways to provide internet content to their end users. And directly peered, multicast agreements between CDNs and ISPs are going to be a real quick way to chop operational costs. Even if that doesn't apply to Netflix content today, it's bound to matter for content that consumers are going to want to consume in real time (sporting events). From the perspective of an ISP operating in a small market, we are seeing a big shift in usage toward Netflix and netflix-like services that is necessarily going to change the model of how we provide internet services. We have limited access to CDN or Content-Producer peering agreements (that would help to save costs) and, even if we did, we're in no position to demand ingress cash flow in those agreements (not enough eyeballs!). Since our users are the ones with the business arrangements with Netflix, and since their demand is shifting in that direction, I'd imagine we'd jump at a chance for private multicast agreements, even if demand didn't quite warrant it at this point. -- Dan White