Daily Archives: April 7, 2006

Why P2P is the only way of distributing TV

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Very thoughtful column by Bob Cringeley, arguing that the only way we will ever get TV over the Net is by harnessing P2P technology. Excerpt:

Twenty million viewers, on average, watch “Desperate Housewives” each week in about 10 million U.S. households. That’s 210 megabytes times 10 million downloads, or 2.1 petabytes of data to be downloaded per episode. Fortunately for the download business model, not everyone is trying to watch the show at the same time or in real time, so iTunes, in this example, has some time to do all those downloads. Let’s give them three days. The question on the table is what size Internet pipe would it take to transfer 2.1 petabytes in 72 hours? I did the math, and it requires 64 gigabits-per-second, which would require an OC-768 fiber link and two OC-256s to fulfill.

There isn’t an Internet backbone provider with that much capacity, much less excess capacity. Fortunately, it wouldn’t have to all go over a single link and could, instead, be injected centrally into the network and fan out to viewers all over the country, in which case the OC-48 and OC-192 links used by Global Crossing, Sprint, MCI and others just might be enough.

But that’s just one popular show. What will we do, then, with American Idol?

Ah, but remember Moore’s Law, which is going to increase our bandwidth dramatically over time! It doesn’t matter. Throw 250 million viewers watching 180 channels up on the Net, raise the resolution to full broadcast then raise it again to HDTV, and even Moore’s Law won’t catch up. Just carrying all the viewers of “Desperate Housewives” at the current iTunes resolution won’t be economically viable for another decade according to Moore’s Law.

I am no Luddite. IP is the future of global communication on all levels. But adding video to the mix is so bandwidth intensive that using current techniques will push back total IP conversion for decades…

Just one quibble. I don’t think it’s Moore’s Law which is giving us bandwidth increases on the scale we’re seeing, but advances in opto-electronics.

Apple v. Apple

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From The Register…

The Beatles’ recording company, Apple Corp., was given an opportunity to object to Apple Comp.’s use of the apple logo in association with the iTunes Music Store. But it chose not to, the iPod maker’s advocate claimed yesterday. Apple Corp. received an ITMS [iTunes Music Store] demo in January 2003 – four months before the service went live, Anthony Grabiner QC told the English High Court.

Grabiner and Apple Corp. lawyer Geoffrey Vos QC made their concluding remarks this week following written and presented testimony from the likes of Apple Corp. chief Neill Aspinall and from Eddie Cue, head of Apple’s iTunes and iPod division.

The judge indicated that he would give a ruling within a month.

Internet use and access in the EU

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AP reports that a European Union report released yesterday shows wide differences in the level of Internet use among EU nations, with Benelux and Nordic countries leading the way and eastern and southeastern Europe generally lagging behind.

In the Netherlands, 78 percent of households are connected to the Net, compared to just 16 percent in Lithuania, according to the report from the Eurostat statistics agency, based on data gathered in early 2005.

The Dutch also lead the way in domestic broadband access, with 54 percent of homes linked up compared to 1 percent in Greece, 4 percent in Cyprus and 5 percent in the Czech Republic.

In Greece, 73 percent of the population say they have never used the Internet, the survey said, well above the EU average of 43 percent. More than half the citizens of the Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Portugal have never logged on to the Net.

Among students, only 7 percent across the EU have never used the Internet.

Overall, the survey showed a rise in Internet connections since 2004. Domestic connections in the EU rose from 43 percent to 48 percent. The number of homes connected to broadband rose from 15 percent to 23 percent.

For EU businesses, Internet access rose from 89 percent to 91 percent, while broadband connections increased from 53 percent to 63 percent.

At least 90 percent of businesses are linked to the Internet in all nations included in the survey, except Latvia, Hungary, Cyprus, Lithuania and Poland. In Sweden, Denmark and Finland over 80 percent of firms have broadband access, compared with less than 45 percent in Cyprus, Poland and Greece.

The survey did not include France, which declined to take part.