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To: tiquer who wrote (31395)	4/28/2000 12:59:00 PM
From: Robert	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

About streaming video.... The technology is basically very simple. Two sockets are set up, one on the client and one on the server, and data is written from the server into the socket to be read by the client. The client then decodes the data to be viewed. On the server side, it reads the video from a database and write to the socket, which looks just like another file descriptor. Let's say you have 100 people all viewing the same video simultaneously. There would be one copy of the video to be distributed. The server has to be fast enough and smart enough to get that copy out to all it's sockets and be intelligent to use enough clock cycles from all its cpu's to get it done. Storage has a relatively easy job, it just sits there. Of course some of the logic could be moved into storage but what if you wanted to jump to a section of the video? Or search for a particular scene? Or view PG censored versions? Do you put that logic in the storage or the server which is more flexible? It is possible to directly attach storage to the net and for certain applications that is the right thing to do but the smart architecture is to have a server to implement all the fancy user logic. Ultimately I think the network and storage can be optical. Optical networking via fiber has advantages as the number of wavelengths is infinite, making it very high volume. Optical storage is also very high capacity, a holographic image is parallel storage all at once, the throughput is huge. But the bottleneck seems to be computing. I have yet to think of how to get the optical equivalent of a transistor with high throughput, ie being able to have two holograms anding/oring at the individual photons. Long story short, bandwidth and storage are the least of our problems, CPU power is the bottleneck.