Hi Tech101,
Your caption reads:
"Each HDTV is as long as 10 GBytes. How much bandwidth does it takes to download. If only 5 thousand people want to make the download, who is going to caching it locally? When millions of such movies/video clips stay on the web, all the bandwidth has to go through the backbone, doesn't it?"
I momentarily assumed, after reading your question, until I read a little deeper into the reference article and visited NBC Universal's Web site, that the two NBC Universal releases being discussed would be distributed over the Web. Unless I'm reading the situation all wrong, apparently that is not the case. Perhaps you were merely projecting into the future when HD titles "would" be available over the Web on a real time basis?
In any event, this alleged piece of reporting is suspect for several reasons, imo. First, it conflates NBC's role with that of a local distributor. And secondarily, directly in the center of its column layout there is a three-inch square advertisement for DirecTV followed by, again, I presume a continuation of the "news article," the following verbiage:
"While DIRECTV is planning to offer 100 national HDTV channels by year's end, the cable operators are rapidly moving to counter by expanding their HD On Demand lineups, both movies and variety programming. Comcast, for instance, now offers 14 On Demand new releases in high-def, including World Trade Center, Crank, Invincible and The Guardian. The films cost $3.99, the same as the non-HD version."
I read this as an attempt to compare satellite HDTV delivery with cable operators' HD "on-demand" capabilities: Apples and oranges. The former is synchronous (programmed), requiring of only relatively passive transmission facilities, albeit a lot of it, whereas, the latter is dynamic, or asynchronous in nature (randomly invoked), requiring of many more moving parts in the way of network management and dynamic cache assignment. In no case, however, are there any public Internet backbone flows or cache resources involved, since the principal last mile distributors use their own backhaul and storage resources, not those of the public Internet.
But here is the kicker:
"Cable operators at this time do not have the bandwidth to match DIRECTV's planned 100 national HD channel lineup. However, it takes less space to store a high-def movie or show than it does an entire 24-hour network."
Hm. I'd gladly discuss these dynamics further, but not when using this "predictions" article as a foundation, unless you or someone else here can demonstrate to me the major point that I am obviously missing.
FAC |
