Rather than mbytes/mo., IMO a more realistic consideration is for the pipe size required for all-you-can-eat service that would be sufficient to fill your eyeballs and ears. That's a pretty finite number. Even multiple screens show up on your HDTV for the same bandwidth as HDTV, using MPEG4 at some small number of mbits/sec.
Once you pick that number and a biz model that supports it at reasonable cost ($50/mo. to $100 with discounts for "basic") you won't be undercut
Unusual situations might be wall-size screens in multiple rooms of the house, but, 95% of the population would watch a couple screens, and the only other real bandwidth hog is giant file transfers of multimedia data, which, I'm suggesting, will be done between backbone servers - you have yours, and your vendor has theirs, and away you go.
We're evolving into a hierarchical store-and-forward network with Tivo-type systems anyway, so you can reserve selected batches, play anytime you want, and capture it if you wish. That adds lots of capacity to a straight HDTV Video On Demand config.
So, all you really need is enough for one HDTV channel, and all the content behind it. If everyone had one of those, Blockbuster would either be online or bust. |
