If something like the slingbox catches on.... www.slingmedia.com -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Patrick W. Gilmore Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 8:26 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Cc: Patrick W. Gilmore Subject: Re: is this like a peering war somehow? On Jan 20, 2006, at 11:16 AM, Joe Abley wrote:
Perhaps this additional networking complexity (and hence cost, at some level, presumably) will allow peoples' eyes to be opened to the fact that the majority of television being viewed over the Internet today is done asynchronously, through peer-to-peer, file- sharing networks.
It amuses me to think of early-adopting consumers receiving all their expensive, network-optimised television shows in real-time on their TiVOs, only to have them recorded to disk and watched days later. (Recorded onto hard disks with no DRM, no less, ready to be encoded and uploaded to eDonkey :-)
If content distribution companies would accept this as the final outcome, then sticking a torrent client on the set-top-box and feeding it from an RSS feed starts to seem a lot cheaper than encumbering every access network with traffic shaping.
Agreed - mostly. Things like sports events will still require real-time feeds, and people will pay for them. But satellite seems like a perfectly reasonable and cost-efficient means of distribution without going through anyone's right-of-way. I mean, seriously, do you think anyone is going to WAIT to see Victoria's Secret Fashion Show? :-) -- TTFN, patrick