Re: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand
In message <5.2.0.9.0.20030627141054.038683c0(a)pele.citylink.co.nz>, Richard Naylor writes:
[Multicast] Well the biggest part of the business is video on demand and that can really only be unicast as getting viewers to agree on what they watch is like agreeing on a TV Channel in a huge flat - hopeless.
Even aside from the live situation you mention (eg, LOTR last year), general overseas experience with video-on-demand has shown that people really only want (to pay for) video-soon-after-demanded. Eg, for a 1-2 hour thing, having to wait, say, 2-5 minutes for it to start isn't a big deal. Even waiting 1 minute for a 10 minute thing isn't _that big a deal. Which means that for popular stuff that is "on demand" it might not be enough to have one channel with it, where the wait time is, say, 15 minutes for it to cycle around -- but it might be fine to have 10-20 channels, suitably staggered, where the wait time was 1-2 minutes. (Add channels to reduce the wait time.) Especially if there was some nice front end whereby people could find out which channel would be showing their thing starting next, and tune into that one. And it's much easier to scale channels-starting-every-minute (say) than it is to scale each-stream-is-unicast-with-its-own-start-point. (Particularly if you don't both starting/continuing the channels if there's nobody receiving it after a few minutes -- that requires some feedback outside multicast, but wouldn't be hard to do with a suitable client application and, say, UDP upstream responses every minute or so.)
back to streaming live and did the LOTR premiere last year with 10,000 clients. Its a lot of fun and didn't really stress much other than a few ISPs.
At least once some traction was made on the urgent call for more peering from the source point to the main sink points. But multicast fully deployed would definitely have helped a lot there. Ewen
At 03:54 p.m. 27/06/2003 +1200, Ewen McNeill wrote:
In message <5.2.0.9.0.20030627141054.038683c0(a)pele.citylink.co.nz>, Richard Naylor writes:
[Multicast] Well the biggest part of the business is video on demand and that can really only be unicast as getting viewers to agree on what they watch is like agreeing on a TV Channel in a huge flat - hopeless.
Even aside from the live situation you mention (eg, LOTR last year), general overseas experience with video-on-demand has shown that people really only want (to pay for) video-soon-after-demanded. Eg, for a 1-2 hour thing, having to wait, say, 2-5 minutes for it to start isn't a big deal. Even waiting 1 minute for a 10 minute thing isn't _that big a deal.
Which means that for popular stuff that is "on demand" it might not be enough to have one channel with it, where the wait time is, say, 15 minutes for it to cycle around -- but it might be fine to have 10-20 channels, suitably staggered, where the wait time was 1-2 minutes. (Add channels to reduce the wait time.)
ah - its that word "channel" that I don't see in the future. Such a dated concept. Instead, you're interested in Alastair Cook. Why should you wait til Monday at 8:45 every week and then miss it because you were on the phone. Hey you have 10 minutes now and would like to catch up with what he said last Monday (when you were on the phone, remember). So why can't you click in now and view it ? Most TV progs come off a cart player at either Avalon or TVC. Saturn used to stream them off Sun boxes at Petone. Why couldn't they just provide you with a link to the files and you can watch when you want. TV news clips are typically 1:30 and are finished thru the day as the day progresses. Why should you have to wait until 6pm to see them in the sequence they determine. If the clip is ready now ? Why wait thru 20 min of news you don't want to see, so that you miss the one you do want. Turn the running sheet into a web page and let the viewers click on the ones they want.......kinda a unicast thing. Multicast is great for synchronous events like TRADITIONAL tv. I just don't see that continuing. rich
On Friday, Jun 27, 2003, at 00:17 Canada/Eastern, Richard Naylor wrote:
Instead, you're interested in Alastair Cook. Why should you wait til Monday at 8:45 every week and then miss it because you were on the phone.
You don't; you let the device attached to your satellite decoder know that Alastair Cook is cool, and the next time it occurs to you to to look you find that there's a small pile of relevant material sitting on the disk waiting for you to watch it. In my experience there's only a very tiny amount of content on TV that's ever worth watching live (and most of the live stuff is endless looped repetition of news you already saw hours before, although maybe that's just a North American phenomenon :) Applications like file distribution and cache synchronisation are much more compelling drivers of multicast. A $30 dish glued to the roof has always seemed to me like a more sensible way of distributing video than trying to shoe-horn it into IP networks.
Multicast is great for synchronous events like TRADITIONAL tv. I just don't see that continuing.
Broadcast is great for content delivery, and that's what satellites do (with a single last-mile network for millions of subscribers). The "on-demand" bit can be pushed to the edge. Joe
participants (3)
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Ewen McNeill -
Joe Abley -
Richard Naylor