In this week's CES coverage on Marketplace, venture capitalist Mark Suster
of GRP Partners opines that Google will bid on the broadcast rights to MNF
within the next 5 years.
Is 'The Internet' ready to deliver live 1080p HD with very close to zero
dropouts to 25-30 million viewers for 4 hours straight every week, yet?
People don't mind buffering in cat videos, but I'm pretty sure they don't
want Tim Tebow's last pass of the game interrupted by an hourglass for 5
seconds.
Will CDN's help this? Multicast? Or is this just a yawn story for you guys
who run "the backbone" these days?
No matter what they show on CSI about enhancing video, if that stream got
compressed so the football Tim Tebow just threw is just a brown ellipse,
there;s no legitimate way to put the seams back on that sucker.
That could be one of the things that helps spur v6 adoption - multicast being somewhat less of an afterthought
While v4 multicast works, and delivering video is one of the things it can do very well, some networks don't route v4 multicast or exchange v4 multicast prefixes, so its utility on a wide scale can be limited.
Referring to some Japanese stations, like ATX-HD. It's not actually
30, but it's pretty bad. It's a brilliant stream of blocks you get
back, not sure if you'd call it video...
Maybe, maybe not. I think not, and for the reason I just posted as a comment
on Marketplace's story:
I call it the Compatible Color problem. Due to DMCA, SOPA, and other such
corporate paranoia legislation purchased by the large media conglomerates, we
may end up in a situation where you need one box to watch Netflix, another
box to watch Google, and so on and so on, yada yada.
Once Congress gets over thinking it's cute to be ignorant of how the internet
works ("series of tubes, right?"), that probably won't play in Washington
anymore than it plays in Peoria... but I hope it doesn't wait to *start*
getting worked on until "The Super Bowl is next Sunday! And my TV doesn't *do*
Google!!!"
Cause that Would Be Bad.
(These problems have, of course, Already Been Solved. But the media companies
aren't interested in those solutions, cause they don't make it possible for
those companies to charge you for the same product 14 times, for your TV,
your computer, your smartphone, your game console, your car....)
</politics>
Weekly football is probably the second most important thing on a TV network
behind the championships for whatever sport they're carrying, in a year.
I'm not saying you need the whole 19mbps (though, remember here, we are not
talking about "Additional Carriage"; we are talking about *being the only way
people can see that game* -- and my example was the Super Bowl).. but unless
MPEG algorithms have gotten *much* better than I'm aware of, 5mb/s is
probably not enough for the Super Bowl. And you'd really be better off with
some FEC, too, even if it costs you a couple frames extra delay.
Yup; at varying bit rates; I worked for a program provider to both, and I
know just how fast the price goes up if you need enough signal to handle
even *slow* motion.
For broadcast networks, what we're seeing they like is that
unlike satellite transmissions, there is more flexibility
for them on IP (IPTv), which would let them lift compression
rates and pack more data into a stream.
But because most of them are primarily satellite
broadcasting houses, only starting to roll-out IPTv, they
need to maintain parity on both transmission media.
Whatever the case, 5Mbps would be too low. At 1080i, we have
a customer pushing HD channels at about 13Mbps a piece, give
or take.
This is misguided, IPV6 does no magic to help scale multicast to Internet
scale compared to IPV4.
Scaling multicast to Internet scale would make our core routers
essentially flow based routers. And as there is finite amount of how many
of these flows you could hold, we would need some way to globally regulate
how and who can push their content as multicast and save lot of money and
who will have to pay the full price.
Those who are left out, might feel like multicast is used to stop
competition.
Now maybe we could specify some sort of stateless 'manycast' in IPv6, where
you'd map destination AS numbers as source address. Needing to send only
one copy of traffic per destination ASN (or less if you can map multiple
ASN in source address), and then destination ASN would need to have Magic
Box to do stateful magic and could cherry-pick what they care about. But
that's lot of complexity for very incomplete solution, as it would only
remove states from transit.
Most vendors took out hardware multicast support and do it via recirculation
these days.
I'm more interested in other topics, this would likely be served by a CDN,
and I'm curious if any CDNs have started placing gear behind CGN/LSN.
I've also noticed some hotels and other 'guest net' folks capturing 4.2.2.1
and comparable open recursive name servers in-house. Two weeks ago I could ping
4.2.2.1 and get responses when TTL was set to 1 on my outgoing packets.
It will be at least 9-10 years before Google could bid. I think the TV
networks get a chance to renew before anyone else can even bid. Unless the
NFL decides to do something with the NFL Network games they are likely SOL.
