On 02/12/10 20:21, Leo Bicknell wrote:
Comcast has around ~15 million high speed Internet subscribers (based on year old data, I'm sure it is higher), which means at peak usage around 0.3% of all Comcast high speed users would be watching.
That's an interesting number, but let's run back the other way. Consider what happens if folks cut the cord, and watch Internet only TV. I went and found some TV ratings:
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/30/tv-ratings-broadcast-top-25-sund...
Sunday Night Football at the top last week, with 7.1% of US homes watching. That's over 23 times as many folks watching as the 0.3% in our previous math! Ok, 23 times 150Gbps.
3.45Tb/s.
Yowzer. That's a lot of data. 345 10GE ports for a SINGLE TV show.
But that's 7.1% of homes, so scale up to 100% of homes and you get 48Tb/sec, that's right 4830 simultaneous 10GE's if all of Comcast's existing high speed subs dropped cable and watched the same shows over the Internet.
I think we all know that streaming video is large. Putting the real numbers to it shows the real engineering challenges on both sides, generating and sinking the content, and why comapnies are fighting so much over it.
You might be interested in the EU-funded P2P-NEXT research initiative, which is creating a P2P system capable of handling P2P broadcasting at massive scale: http://www.p2p-next.org/ -- Neil (full disclosure: I'm associated with one of the participants in the project)