Sam,
I'm not too sure what you're really asking, I might be better able to respond to a specific question. A couple of quick thoughts, though. More and more bandwidth-hungry content is available on the web. The largest chunk of this is probably today RealVideo snippets, delivered mostly in the choppy, postage-stamp format that modem access implies. Even there, as the numbers of users grow, the server-side issues in delivering a lot of this become significant, even though numbers of users are still at most tens of thousands for any one service - a long way from broadcast numbers. Broadcast.com is one company with a business around supporting this, though I'm not too familiar with them.
As end-user bandwidth, and numbers of users accessing a single source grow, I think we'll see a qualitative change. There'll be a need for more smart technology in the network to manage this as it grows. Multi-casting is an internet standard that's probably one piece of the picture. But this cannot be just about standards - the need is to deliver end-to-end service that scales, at reasonable cost. It's still unclear to me how and by whom the costs are borne - the customer's ISP, the broadband service provider, their ISP? @Home is the only service provider I'm aware of who's been thinking deeply about this. RealNetworks, working with them and independently, is thinking about the system-wide issues. (Ie not just server and client, but probably also 'repeater' or 'caching' servers that sit in the network). I've not heard of anyone paying much attention to these problems in the DSL realm, so I expect to see roll-outs of services there happening slower than people expect.
- Roger. |
