On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Petri Helenius wrote:
In any case, TV (of all things) does not have problems with latency or jitter below 10s of seconds. All TV content is pre-packaged.
Live events and interactive show's are not.
"Live" events are typically delayed by a minute or so to give time to editors to decide on course of action if something goes wrong with "live" feed. In any case, nobody cares about another half-minute of delay. The same pretty much goes for "interactive" shows - which all have interaction loops of minutes, not sub-second response which is hard to do over the regular Internet.
In some cases you start to suffer if your latency goes to multiple-seconds range. That's quite rare anyway, >500ms network latency is quite rare and add few hundred codec and de-jitter latency and you'll find that excessive jitter is your enemy, not the latency itself.
Excessive jitter is easily converted into latency by having bigger buffers at the receiving end. So far, the only mass applications which have real need to have low latency are telephony (including video kind) and on-line gaming. Those are relatively low-bandwidth, and so don't contribute much to long-haul traffic. Of course, hauling bits over long-distance circuits costs more than doing the same over local exchanges - but the current routing technology makes having hundreds of local exchanges somewhat infeasible. --vadim