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