Category Archives: YouTube

AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010

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From ZDNet…

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. “We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,” he said.

He claimed that the “unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic” would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,” he said…

The Davos gabfest

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It’s that time of year again — the world’s bosses have gathered in Davos to do some schmoozing and pretend they have social consciences. Bill Gates delivered his plea for a kinder, gentler capitalism*, for example, which is bit like hoping that wild boars will learn to respect suburban flower-beds.

Needless to say, the Google boys are there — and there’s a substantial YouTube presence as a result. See, for example, the Davos question where the fat cats post their answers to the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies and individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”.

*Footnote: latest kinder, gentler capitalist results. Microsoft sales up 30%, profits up 79%.

Berkeley puts courses videos on YouTube

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Yep — according to TechCrunch…

The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.

The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube…

Here’s Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines.

Later: Tony Hirst’s built a neat little search engine for the Berkeley shows.

Numbers: the movie

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Sean French pointed me to this:

Like him, I’m baffled by how anyone could have such an encyclopedic knowledge of film. This is not the kind of stuff you find by Googling.

More… Quentin (like Sean, a movie buff) writes: ” I wonder if somebody had access to the close-caption text transcripts for a large movie library – you could search that…”