On Feb 12, 2013, at 01:06 , Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us> wrote:
On 02/11/2013 03:52 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
One of us has a different dictionary than everyone else.
I'm not sure it's different dictionaries, I think you're talking past each other.
No, it's definitely different dictionaries. I am purposely staying out of the whole multicast vs. CDN vs. set-top caching vs. $RANDOM_TECHNOLOGY thing. I was concentrating sole on one point - that the long tail "is _by definition_ a tiny fraction of total demand" (Stephen's emphasis). The long tail might be a fraction, or it might be a majority of the traffic. Depends on the use case. Important to remember this discussing the pros & cons of each protocol / approach. As for the rest, time will tell. But it's fun to watch the discussion, especially by people who have never attempted any of what they are espousing. :) Hey, sometimes that's where the best ideas come up - people who don't know what is impossible are not constrained! -- TTFN, patrick
Video on demand and broadcast are 2 totally different animals. For VOD, multicast is not a good fit, clearly. But for broadcast, it has a lot of potential. Most of the issues with people wanting to pause, rewind, etc. are already handled by modern DVRs, even with live programming.
What I haven't seen yet in this discussion (and sorry if I've missed it) is the fact that every evening every broadcast network sends out hour after hour of what are essentially "live" broadcasts, in the sense that they were not available "on demand" before they were aired "on TV" that night. In addition to live broadcasts, this nightly programming is ideal for multicast, especially since nowadays most of that programming is viewed off the DVR at another time anyway. So filling up that DVR (or even watching it live) could happen over multicast just as well as it could happen over unicast.
But more importantly, what's missing from this conversation is that the broadcast networks, the existing cable/satellite/etc. providers, and everyone else who has a multi-billion dollar vested interest in the way that the business is structured now would fight this tooth and nail. So we can engineer all the awesome solutions we want, they are overwhelmingly unlikely to actually happen.
Doug