On Feb 9, 2013, at 6:45 AM, fredrik danerklint <fredan-nanog@fredan.se> wrote:
No. Streaming from services, like Netflix, HBO, etc..., is what's coming. We need to prepare for the bandwidth they are going to be using.
Then work on your HTTP caching infrastructure. All these services already use a proprietary form of HTTP adaptive streaming, either MSFT, Adobe, or Apple. These technologies are being unified by DASH in the MPEG/ISO standards bodies. Adaptive HTTP chunk streaming gives you the best of multicast-like and cached VoD behavior, exploiting the temporal locality of popularity in content while not requiring multicast. As a content publisher, I must say it works wonders for us so far, even with just two bitrates. There is a huge HTTP caching infrastructure out there in businesses, schools, and other orgs that is unused by other video transports; even plain HTTP downloads usually overrun cache object size limits. The Olympic streaming in particular showed how well HTTP chunk video can scale; dozen of screens in my org showed the same content all day from local cache, with no noticeable spikes on our transit links. Is HTTP as efficient a protocol as possible for transporting video? No, but 1K of headers per 1M of content chunk puts it within 0.1% of netcat. And "working now with widely deployed infrastructure" beats "stuck in Internet Draft forever".