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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (9833)	12/20/2000 7:06:17 AM
From: RAT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

"The (or at least one) tricky part would seem to be the VCR like controls - stop, pause, slow motion - operated via the STB but with the actual function residing on a remote server." "I don't understand why is this tricky? That's how the current VOD rollouts are being done today? So I don't think I'm understanding your comment correctly." I guess the best way I can explain it is an example - assume the recorded program resides at a hub and that hub serves - say 50 - people. Everybody wants to record the 6 o'clock news. The cable company doesn't record the same program 50 times - they record it once. Now it is 7:00 and the rush hour commuters are all arriving at their suburban homes. between 7:02 and 7:10, all 50 start watching the recorded news programs. So there are 50 streams coming from how many versions of the file - 1? 10? 50? There needs to be some mechanism to allow each home to stop, pause, rewind, fast forward the program. I can imagine how a cable company could enable that with 50 separate streams with 50 unique underlying files, but that would seem to be bandwidth and storage overkill (and more money than the cable companies care to spend). A single file operating 50 different streams would seem to be a difficult operation for a single server to handle. I probably don't understand the underlying architecture of the VOD systems enough to clearly see if the problem that I picture is resolved or if I am not articulate enough to explain the potential problem. This will probably be redundant, but if you have any good resources that make an attempt at explaining the underlying architecture, I'd appreciate it if you could point me in that direction. Thanks - and thanks for continuing to educate the newbies on the board...