On 02/11/2013 03:52 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
One of us has a different dictionary than everyone else.
I'm not sure it's different dictionaries, I think you're talking past each other.
Video on demand and broadcast are 2 totally different animals. For VOD, multicast is not a good fit, clearly. But for broadcast, it has a lot of potential. Most of the issues with people wanting to pause, rewind, etc. are already handled by modern DVRs, even with live programming.
What I haven't seen yet in this discussion (and sorry if I've missed it) is the fact that every evening every broadcast network sends out hour after hour of what are essentially "live" broadcasts, in the sense that they were not available "on demand" before they were aired "on TV" that night. In addition to live broadcasts, this nightly programming is ideal for multicast, especially since nowadays most of that programming is viewed off the DVR at another time anyway. So filling up that DVR (or even watching it live) could happen over multicast just as well as it could happen over unicast.
Yes, but this basically assumes that we don't/won't see a change in their video distribution model, which is actually an unknown, rather than a given.
But more importantly, what's missing from this conversation is that the broadcast networks, the existing cable/satellite/etc. providers, and everyone else who has a multi-billion dollar vested interest in the way that the business is structured now would fight this tooth and nail. So we can engineer all the awesome solutions we want, they are overwhelmingly unlikely to actually happen.
If Big Content can figure out a way to extract money from the end user without involving middlemen like cable and satellite providers, then we'll see a shift. There is no guarantee of an ongoing business model just because that's the way it worked. Look at what's happened to Blockbuster Video, which has gone from being a multi-billion dollar company to being well on its way to irrelevance. What you're actually likely to see is a fight "tooth and nail" to ignore the signs of the coming storm, but that's not going to stop the storm, is it. It will just open the door for more visionary businesses. So, boiling everything down, the two Big Questions I see are: 1) Will throwing more bandwidth at the problem effectively allow the problem to be solved more easily than getting all the technical requirements (CPE, networks, etc.) for multicast to work? I keep having this flashback to the early days of DSL and VoIP when I would hear statements like "VoIP over the public Internet will never work" over what are essentially that day's versions of these concerns. 2) Whether or not we'll have broadcast networks sufficiently large to make it worth the investment to solve the mcast hurdles, or if maybe their entire distribution model just undergoes a tectonic shift... which is hardly unprecedented, consider the sort of shift dialtone is experiencing w.r.t. Ma Bell's POTS plant. In the meantime, the amount of non-broadcast video available as VOD continues to grow at a staggering pace. The answer appears to be that multicast would be great if everything were to remain as-is, but that seems a poor assumption. We're still in a period where multicast would be an awesome thing to have, but we do not have it, and people are successfully moving away from the "broadcast TV channel" model of video distribution, to a VOD model where they can watch what they want, when they want, without being limited to the 60 hours that their DVR happens to have queued up ("how quaint" in this age of the mighty cloud!) If you graph that all out, the picture you get shows a declining RoI for multicast. Any businessman would look at that and advise against any significant investment in solving a problem that is already on a path to self-resolution. We know how to solve 1) by throwing bandwidth at it even if we cringe at the requisite numbers today; throwing bandwidth at it is a brute force solution that makes your C and J salespeople smile. Products like the AppleTV/iPad/etc have managed to make somewhat uncomfortable marriages out of day-after-broadcast video and VOD(*). We have clever ideas about how to solve 1) with multicast, but no real world implementations that actually work at any sort of scale, and that's such a huge impediment to implementation when compared to just scaling known bandwidth and unicast delivery technologies... We also have seen, from the advent of cable TV, that the availability of new transmission opportunities leads to decreased viewership of the OTA broadcast networks, and a growing pool of alternative video to watch. But now here's the killer. The networks that could most benefit from multicast, the existing TV networks, what's the incentive for them to develop multicast technologies, something which I expect that their distribution partners would see as a further unwelcome jab at eventually cutting out the middleman? I think it has been a hard enough sell for them to support buying shows (iTunes, Amazon, whatever) but they're likely to get a lot of pushback from existing dist partners as to why another broadcast technology would be needed, when cable/satellite already have "solved" this problem and have a huge investment. (*) I would note that legacy TV, with its requirement that you be available to watch it when broadcast, or have a device handy to spool it for later viewing, is an uncomfortable marriage of content and viewer. FWIW. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.