Still No Sign Of The Exaflood > That's the whole point

reply to espaeth

Re: That's the whole point

Growth is gone

You're missing my point. You talk about couriers "taking over" for USPS but you actually think for a second that United Parcel Service and Fedex haven't taken business from the Postal Service? No one here is saying that iTunes will completely replace MSO VOD, only that it's a huge threat to MSO PPV revenue just as UPS and Fedex are a huge threat to USPS revenues.

In terms of scalability, remember, Apple and Microsoft don't offer free content. All of their content is revenue generating so while the more VOD content Comcast sees used, the more money it costs them, the opposite is true for Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. The more views they have the more revenue they make. That is why they are easily scalable; every view pays for itself with plenty of margin.

MSOs are working, via caps, to insure the "couriers" of today; iTunes, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc, don't become the UPS and Fedex of tomorrow.

Except we have yet to see any verified instances of major network congestion that warrants nationwide capping/fapping policies. The ISPs that have been crying congestion (like Bell Canada) turned out to be lying when forced to actually provide data supporting their assertions.

We're not talking about top end usage. Comcast's plan includes a FAP in addition to the big cap. Just a few hours of usage can result in the connection being traffic shaped to the point of breaking the stream (as the buffer empties). Time Warner's testing includes caps so low that just a few movies would cause a customer to start paying overage fees with no other traffic. Even my provider, Cox, has low caps and if they actually enforced them would severely impact my rental patterns. And unfortunately their competitor is AT&T, which now that they have their own VOD services are also planning caps (for no reason according to reported industry insiders familiar with their network loads).

reply to espaeth

However, when you continue to add hosts to a node without upgrading the node, and add in the speed increase, and it's a recipe for disaster.

And way to build a network that cannot satisfy your customers' demand. Stop advertising that you can get to streaming music, videos, and the like FASTER if the network is not built to handle it.

cw

It's not "the node" that is the capacity problem. It's how many channels the MSO dedicates for transport between the node and head end. You could put a zillion customers on a node if you dedicate enough channels for it. This is why SDV, ditching analog and DOCSIS 3 will virtually eradicate these current capacity limitations occurring in some local areas. The video bandwidth saved allows for more channels to be dedicated to HSI and DOCSIS 3 channel bonding allows higher per user throughput.

57 [hundred] channels... and nothing on. (old joke)

There are, maybe, a couple channels/networks that I'd be willing to pay for, but I'm not willing to pay $40 and up for dozens of channels I don't want to watch in order to get just those 2, so I'll do without. I'm actually using Hulu to replace my TV watching for a few shows that I [sometimes] enjoy watching, plus Hulu has fewer and shorter commercial breaks, and the picture quality is quite good. It's as close as you can get to a la carte (except it's free).

TV is very low on my priorities list, or, actually, not on the list at all. Hulu (and the like) is fairly new, and the user base is growing. As a concept I expect it to be a "threat" to the cable/satellite/etc TV oligarchy at some point, though maybe not very soon. As such, they may want to start looking at offering customers ONLY what they want to pay for (a la carte) and let the rest of the channels die a natural death if customers just don't want them: fair's fair.