On Sun, 11 Feb 2007, Frank Coluccio wrote:
do what google is presumably doing (lots of fiber), or would they put some capital and preorder into IDMR?
IDMR is great if you're a broadcaster or a backbone, but how does it help the last 2 miles, the phoneco ATM network or the ISP network where you have 10k different users watching 10k different channels? I'm not sure if it would help with a multinode replication network like what google is probably up to either (which explains why they want dedicated bandwidth, internode replication solves the backup problems as well).
TIVO type setup with a massive archive of every show so you can not only watch this weeks episode but you can tivo download any show from the last 6 years worth of your favorite series is one heck of a draw over cable or satellite and might be enough to motivate the public to move to a different service. A better tivo than tivo. As for making money, just stick a commercial on the front of every download. How many movies are claimed downloaded on the fileshare networks every week?
Not only that, but you can target the advertisement to the viewer (or expected viewer). A company will gladly spend the same $100,000-$500,000 they would for 30 second spot during prime time if they knew that only 5-10% of the audience would see it, but that 5-10% was their target demographic. Now instead of me being forced to watch 15-20 minutes of mostly irrelevant-to-me ads, I watch 3 30 second spots that are targeted directly to someone like me. That money should be able to cover the cost of the show plus the same profit margins as before. What about multicast? Why not start a bunch of channels that broadcast data? Streams larger than the last mile can handle could get buffered at the provider end. End users can turn on and off streams as they so choose (unattended even, a la TiVo), or grab stuff on demand from the providers' cache, a la TiVo. Then again, is bandwidth really a problem? It doesn't seem so. Beckman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@purplecow.com http://www.purplecow.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------