Jonathan Schwartz points out that video over IP will stress today’s network infrastucture (via Kevin Werbach)
“When it’s put onto DVD, the movie will size up to something like 5 Gigabytes. Requested by 250,000 technology executives (or more likely, their kids) on a quiet evening – for display on their new IP TV’s or mobile handsets, or through their set top boxes – that’s going to put some burden on the network. Big data (5 Gb), relatively small compute (decode, check for authorization, etc.). Caches will help, but it’s a classic parallel throughput problem.”
But you know, we are already doing it. This is why we have distributed p2p file transfer like BitTorrent and site like suprnova.org. In fact, latest statistics shows that P2P traffic account for 50% 66%1 of the Internet traffic and we haven’t witness any breakdown…yet.
1 See http://www.isp-planet.com/research/2004/cachelogic_data.html (Thanks Dewayne for the correction :-)
