At 10:06 p.m. 8/07/2003 +1200, Ewen McNeill wrote:
In message <20030708092651.GM4808(a)stuckist.macewan.gen.nz>, Hamish MacEwan writes:
On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 13:05 +1200, Ewen McNeill wrote:
In message <5.2.0.9.0.20030627160856.02023200(a)pele.citylink.co.nz>, Richard Naylor writes:
ah - its that word "channel" that I don't see in the future. Such a dated concept.
Ah. Channels are double-plus-ungood. Call it a stream if it makes you feel happier. Or VDC or whatever.
I think Rich's point is broader than "channels," it goes to the notion of "broadcast," which, while like most things is not going to go away anytime soon, but the option of obtaining material from P2P or other sources (Tivo as so aptly observed by Joe) and assembling your own experience is becoming more feasible,
I'm not anti-channel, just trying to establish a different model. In my spare time (stop laughing NOW) I'd like to shoot a small series of programmes and just release them every week at the same time, for however many installments we run for. So if you miss the live screening, you just watch the canned version. I might not even bother with the live bit. The point is you watch in your time frame not mine.
Except that a Tivo listens to (a bunch of) broadcast channels (there, two horrible words in a row!) and caches the "interesting" stuff that it sees for later viewing.
They (and windvr et al) all tend to have a home website with tv listings rthaer than scanning the channels. Thats why many of them don't work down here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-multicast. I agree its the most efficient way of distributing a synchronous event. Its just I don't see a lot of synchronous events......I even have two very large multicast boxes at home at the moment - Access Grids. Multicasting is absolutely ideal for Access Grids, which is many to many simultaneous communication. But the audience is small (a few hundred) at few locations (40-50). Its just as the size of "live" viewer base gets smaller, and bandwidth higher, multicasting doesn't seem worth the effort. If I stream an event for say 10 viewers, why should the rest of the NZ net get it sent to them without asking for it. rich