On Jan 6, 2007, at 10:19 AM, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:
On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 09:09:19AM -0600, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
2. The question I don't understand is, why stream?
There are other good reasons, but fundamentally; because of live telivision.
In these days, when a terabyte disk for consumer PCs is about to be introduced, why bother with streaming? It is so much simpler to download (at faster than real-time rates, if possible), and play it back.
That might be worse for download operators, because people may download an hour of video, and only watch 5 minutes :/
Our logs show that, for every 100 people who start to watch a stream, only 2 or 5 % watch over 30 minutes in one sitting, even for VOD where they presumably have some interest in the movie up front, and more more than 9% will watch all of VOD movie, even over multiple viewings. This is also very consistent with time, but I don't have any pretty plots handy. (Our cumulative audience in 2006 was 2.74 million people, I have lots of statistics.) So, from that standpoint, making a video file available for download is wasting order of 90% of the bandwidth used to download it. Regards Marshall
-- Colm MacCárthaigh Public Key: colm +pgp@stdlib.net