All H.264?
Gian Anthony Constantine
Senior Network Design Engineer
Earthlink, Inc.
On Jan 10, 2007, at 4:41 AM, Richard Naylor wrote:
At 08:40 p.m. 9/01/2007 -0500, Gian Constantine wrote:
It would not be any easier. The negotiations are very complex. The
issue is not one of infrastructure capex. It is one of jockeying
between content providers (big media conglomerates) and the video
service providers (cable companies).
We're seeing a degree of co-operation in this area. Its being
driven by the market. - see below.
<snip>
On Jan 9, 2007, at 7:57 PM, Bora Akyol wrote:
An additional point to consider is that it takes a lot of effort and
$$$$ to get a channel allocated to your content in a cable network.
This is much easier when TV is being distributed over the Internet.
The other bigger driver, is that for most broadcasters (both TV and
Radio), advertising revenues are flat, *except* in the on-line
area. So they are chasing on-line growth like crazy. Typically on-
line revenues now make up around 25% of income.
So broadcasters are reacting and developing quite large systems for
delivering content both new and old. We're seeing these as a
mixture of live streams, on-demand streams, on-demand downloads and
torrents. Basically, anything that works and is reliable and can be
scaled. (we already do geographic distribution and anycast routing).
And the broadcasters won't pay flash transit charges. They are
doing this stuff from within existing budgets. They will put
servers in different countries if it makes financial sense. We have
servers in the USA, and their biggest load is non-peering NZ based
ISPs.
And broadcasters aren't the only source of large content. My
estimate is that they are only 25% of the source. Somewhere last
year I heard John Chambers say that many corporates are seeing 500%
growth in LAN traffic - fueled by video.
We do outside webcasting - to give you an idea of traffic, when we
get a fiber connex, we allow for 6GBytes per day between an encoder
and the server network - per programme. We often produce several
different programmes from a site in different languages etc. Each
one is 6GB. If we don't have fiber, it scales down to about 2GB per
programme. (on fiber we crank out a full 2Mbps Standard Def stream,
on satellite we only get 2Mbps per link). I have a chart by my
phone that gives the minute/hour/day/month traffic impact of a
whole range of streams and refer to it every day. Oh - we can do
1080i on demand and can and do produce content in that format.
They're 8Mbps streams. Not many viewers tho :-) We're close to
being able to webcast it live.
We currently handle 50+ radio stations and 12 TV stations, handling
around 1.5 to 2million players a month, in a country with a
population of 4million. But then my stats could be lying......
Rich
(long time lurker)
