Dear Michael; On Jan 7, 2007, at 8:18 AM, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
That might be worse for download operators, because people may download an hour of video, and only watch 5 minutes :/
So, from that standpoint, making a video file available for download is wasting order of 90% of the bandwidth used to download it.
Considering that this is supposed to be a technically oriented list, I am shocked at the level of ignorance of networking technology displayed here.
Have folks never heard of content-delivery networks, Akamai, P2P, BitTorrent, EMule?
Most of the video sites I know of in detail or have researched do not use Akamai or other local caching services. (Youtube uses Limelight for delivery, for example, as AFAIKT they do no caching outside of that network. Certainly, the Youtube video I have looked at here through tcpdump and traceroute seems to transit the network.) And P2P services like BitTorrent do not conserve network bandwidth. (Although, they might in the future.) What does save network bandwidth is progressive download; if people actually look at what they downloading, they may stop it in progress if they don't want it. (I know I do.)
--Michael Dillon
Regards Marshall