I believe that the element that has been missing in this discussion thus far has been the source (content) players, and where they are hiding. CDNs, a la Akamai, Limelight, etc., will take up some of the slack and mitigate much of the backbone burden where legitimate ISPs are concerned, as will hierarchical caching for the newbie carriers-that-came-to-be-called "ISPs" -i.e., the MSOs and Telcos. Playing the Pareto, the higher the demand (95/5) for a title, the closer it will be stored to the user community, and the longer the tail (5/95) of a title, the farther its storage from the user community. My point is, CDNs and hierarchical cache must be inserted into the calculus, because one, they are already being used, and two, their use will only increase with time, fwiw. Frank ps - I've had some issues with my email editor of late. If anyone notices any artifacts or extraneous characters in the delivery of this message, kindly email me off list and I shall be indebted to you, tia. On Sun Feb 11 19:22 , "Geo." sent:

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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).

Also forgetting that bandwidth issue for a moment, where is the draw that makes IPTV better than cable or satellite? I mean come on guys, if the world had started out with IPTV live broadcasts over the internet and then someone developed cable, satellite, or over the air broadcasting, any of those would have been considered an improvement. IPTV needs something the others don't have and a simple advantage is that of an archive instead of broadcast medium. The model has to be different from the broadcast model or it's never going to fly.

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?

Geo.