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fifty nine
join:2002-09-25
Sussex, NJ

fifty nine

Member

Too much effort for too little reward

Cuban is somewhat right.

Internet streaming takes a lot of horsepower and effort.

Traditional broadcast is much more efficient.

You want to watch the SB for free? Get an antenna. That's what I did.

buddahbless
join:2005-03-21
Premium

buddahbless

Member

I think those on netfilx and hulu would disagree with cuban.. It does not take to much in my opinion ( unless your trying for full HD), it just overall depends on mode of deliver and to what type of device your using. IE a stand alone sony SMP media players for example. I have 2 set up at My mothers house in the far out Chicago burbs in IL where there is no cable access and only DSL via ATT. and guess what they stream crackle to one and netflix on the other on 32' and 40" tvs and they both work fine at the same time even given that the Internet is only at 3mbps and you can still surf the web on another laptops ( note don't try and download a 1.3GB movie torrent at the same time thats over pushing it). Id say if there was a media player that could stream Local free broadcasts the ones your OTA digital converter boxes are suppose to for free ( from any local broadcast station in the US) you would see the tides changing, and a redeveloved intrest in stand alone media players. Id rather purchase a media player ( like roku, netger's, WDs, or Sony) that has access to every local free broadcast across the USA via internet access "were talking 100s of local channels now" than pay for comcast, uverse tv, dish, or direct for channels I never watch.

That Antenna you threw up let me tell you that does not work for crap here In IL and many parts of the country. If you more than 30 miles out of Chicago. The entire switch to digital OTA box, IMHO fails miserably. I know too many people in to many locations that are not served by Uverse or cable and went with that darn digital box in trying to avoid having to pay A satellite provider for basic local stations and I hear nothing but complaints of no signal, heavy distortions, and frozen boxes. Be glad your in Jersey.
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Austin, TX

iansltx to fifty nine

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to fifty nine
That's not free anymore...you have to pay for the antenna and hope you can get line of sight to your local NBC affiliate

Seriously though, there was no technical reason for the streaming Superbowl experience to be as horrid as it was. The stream actually performed much better on my Kindle Fire than on the laptop that was being used to show the game to myself and a few friends. No halftime show and a couple of crappy adds repeated over and over weren't technical failures...they were business ones.

Speaking of technical stuff, the stream was provided by Level3 if I've heard correctly. They have capacity and to spare for an event like this, large though it may be. They just had to turn it up, which they did after the first few minutes of the game.

elios
join:2005-11-15
Springfield, MO

elios

Member

sounds like the SAME bullshit they pulled at the Winter Olympics and im betting the same crap they will pull this summer
limited streams day+ delays and TV coverage thats nothing but recaps

fifty nine
join:2002-09-25
Sussex, NJ

fifty nine to buddahbless

Member

to buddahbless
You're talking about staggered streaming of pre-recorded events.

This is live streaming of a live event. Big difference.

It's not easy to pull off something the size of the superbowl. It's not cheap either. Your $7/month Netflix subscription probably won't cover all the costs.

SpaethCo
Digital Plumber
MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN

SpaethCo to buddahbless

MVM

to buddahbless
said by buddahbless:

I think those on netfilx and hulu would disagree with cuban..

Then they would not be disagreeing with what Cuban has actually said. Take for example his own words in blog posts like this: »blogmaverick.com/2009/01 ··· deo-lie/

The argument is not that all Internet video won't work, but rather that simultaneous viewing of live content had a cost structure and technical issues that will prevent it from being a replacement technology for traditional broadcast video.

Just looking at the Netflix numbers, Wired published an article that had a factoid that on any given night only 1.8% of Netflix subscribers stream video on any given night. At the time, Netflix had 16.9 million subscribers, so we're looking at around 300k streaming viewers on an average evening.

If you look at the numbers from Nielson, you have the NFL playoffs (not even the SuperBowl yet) pulling in 57 million live viewers. Even shows like American Idol pull in 18-21 million live viewers.

To use the Internet to deliver simultaneous video to even a few million viewers would be astronomically more expensive than current broadcast video solutions.
chances14
join:2010-03-03
Michigan

chances14 to iansltx

Member

to iansltx
said by iansltx:

That's not free anymore...you have to pay for the antenna and hope you can get line of sight to your local NBC affiliate

it was free for me using our 15 year old roof mounted antenna lol. and considering that we don't pay for hd with our paid tv, it was an even added bonus to watch it in high def

TwighlightLA
Premium Member
join:2010-07-03

TwighlightLA to buddahbless

Premium Member

to buddahbless
said by buddahbless:

I think those on netfilx and hulu would disagree with cuban..

I'm no expert and perhaps I also misunderstand the technology but Netflix is different in several key areas from live streaming of the Super Bowl. Netflix is different because:

1. What it streams is pre-recorded.

2. The demand at any given time on the Netflix servers is miniscule compared to what I would perceive the user demand would be for the Super Bowl. Just too much demand. The "Power" needed to meet the demand is business wise unobtainable for quality streaming.
sonicmerlin
join:2009-05-24
Cleveland, OH

sonicmerlin to SpaethCo

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to SpaethCo
the stream was provided by level3. you vastly underestimate the capacity of the core networks. Netflix streaming costs are a tiny fraction of their overall costs. licensing is a much bigger cost. it costs less than a penny to stream 1 gb.

whataname
@iauq.com

whataname to fifty nine

Anon

to fifty nine
said by fifty nine:

You're talking about staggered streaming of pre-recorded events.

This is live streaming of a live event. Big difference.

It's not easy to pull off something the size of the superbowl. It's not cheap either. Your $7/month Netflix subscription probably won't cover all the costs.

I'm a little confused. I thought there was a major problem with pirates offering this for free? So now pirates that are offering free streams can do it with low enough costs to cover it with advertising alone - but the big companies can't figure it out with even a $7 per month cost?

Something does not compute for me here.

Unless people are talking about replacing the broadcast with internet streams, I am fairly certain a legitimate free stream should be relatively easy to set up and could easily be covered by advertising costs.

SpaethCo
Digital Plumber
MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN

SpaethCo to sonicmerlin

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to sonicmerlin
said by sonicmerlin:

the stream was provided by level3. you vastly underestimate the capacity of the core networks. Netflix streaming costs are a tiny fraction of their overall costs. licensing is a much bigger cost. it costs less than a penny to stream 1 gb.

I believe you're misunderstanding the premise of the argument. Netflix is streaming to ~300K people at a time, the SuperBowl had 117.7 million people watching at one point.

Even if you somehow got the video stream down to 1mbps and that was acceptable to everyone, you'd still be looking at 117,700,000megabit to stream that to everyone. Keep in mind the biggest interface you can get in network equipment today is 100gigabit (at a cost of $80k+ per port), and for servers you're only going to be able to economically deliver 10gig interfaces.

So to meet 117.7TERAbit, you'd have to spread that across a minimum of 11,770 server interfaces to stream the video. If you want to match Netflix average streaming rates of 2mbps, that's 235.4TERAbit, or 23,540 server interfaces. Hell, even if just 1% of people who watched the SuperBowl tried to stream it, it would still be QUADRUPLE what Netflix streams on a nightly basis.

To put this in perspective, to stream 2mbps to the average nightly 300k Netflix subscribers you're only looking at 600GIGAbit of aggregate traffic. This is obviously a much more reasonable minimum of 60 x 10Gig server interfaces to kick out those streams.

Level(3) does indeed have a ton of capacity, but you have to be delusional to think they're sitting on a couple hundred terabit of capacity waiting to stream things.
hescominsoon
join:2003-02-18
Brunswick, MD

hescominsoon to fifty nine

Member

to fifty nine
said by fifty nine:

Cuban is somewhat right.

Internet streaming takes a lot of horsepower and effort.

Traditional broadcast is much more efficient.

You want to watch the SB for free? Get an antenna. That's what I did.

wrong. The technology/horsepower/bandwidth..etc etc etc is in place. NBC streamed many nfl games in great full screen quality throughout the year. I know i watched several games on the nbc website in good full screen quality. The fact they screwed up the superbowl leads me to believe this was intentional.
steven s
Premium Member
join:2002-09-14
Dearborn, MI

steven s to whataname

Premium Member

to whataname
The people who post pirated content don't have to pay licensing fees, and accessing live pirated streams is not easy or self-explanatory for the layman, so there is also less bandwidth.

Those sites couldn't do it for free if they had to pay the licensing fees and stream to hundreds of millions of households.

fifty nine
join:2002-09-25
Sussex, NJ

fifty nine to whataname

Member

to whataname
said by whataname :

I'm a little confused. I thought there was a major problem with pirates offering this for free? So now pirates that are offering free streams can do it with low enough costs to cover it with advertising alone - but the big companies can't figure it out with even a $7 per month cost?

If I stole a bunch of plasma TVs I can sell them out of the back of a truck for $50 and still make a decent profit.

Likewise, if I steal someone's stream and don't pay licensing fees to the NFL, my profit margin is infinity.
fifty nine

fifty nine to SpaethCo

Member

to SpaethCo
said by SpaethCo:

Level(3) does indeed have a ton of capacity, but you have to be delusional to think they're sitting on a couple hundred terabit of capacity waiting to stream things.

Nope. They're bullying Comcast into giving it to them for free and crying mommy to the FCC when they don't get what they want.
fifty nine

fifty nine to hescominsoon

Member

to hescominsoon
said by hescominsoon:

wrong. The technology/horsepower/bandwidth..etc etc etc is in place. NBC streamed many nfl games in great full screen quality throughout the year. I know i watched several games on the nbc website in good full screen quality. The fact they screwed up the superbowl leads me to believe this was intentional.

It was not intentional. I work in the industry (in fact some of my former coworkers now work at 30 rock). We and any large media company would never do something like this intentionally. It just looks bad, and advertisers don't pay a lot of money for crappy streaming.

elwoodblues
Elwood Blues
Premium Member
join:2006-08-30
Somewhere in

elwoodblues to fifty nine

Premium Member

to fifty nine
said by fifty nine:

said by whataname :

I'm a little confused. I thought there was a major problem with pirates offering this for free? So now pirates that are offering free streams can do it with low enough costs to cover it with advertising alone - but the big companies can't figure it out with even a $7 per month cost?

If I stole a bunch of plasma TVs I can sell them out of the back of a truck for $50 and still make a decent profit.

Likewise, if I steal someone's stream and don't pay licensing fees to the NFL, my profit margin is infinity.

They already paid the NFL for broadcast rights, there are no additional licensing costs to show the Superbowl. Each network gets it in turn.

wmcbrine
join:2002-12-30
Laurel, MD

wmcbrine to SpaethCo

Member

to SpaethCo
This is why we have multicast.

SpaethCo
Digital Plumber
MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN

SpaethCo

MVM

said by wmcbrine:

This is why we have multicast.

While you are correct multicast was designed to solve this problem of uniform distribution, there is no practical support for multicast on the public Internet.
NefCanuck
join:2007-06-26
Mississauga, ON

NefCanuck to hescominsoon

Member

to hescominsoon
said by hescominsoon:

said by fifty nine:

Cuban is somewhat right.

Internet streaming takes a lot of horsepower and effort.

Traditional broadcast is much more efficient.

You want to watch the SB for free? Get an antenna. That's what I did.

wrong. The technology/horsepower/bandwidth..etc etc etc is in place. NBC streamed many nfl games in great full screen quality throughout the year. I know i watched several games on the nbc website in good full screen quality. The fact they screwed up the superbowl leads me to believe this was intentional.

To be fair though, there is likely a vast difference in the number of people looking to stream a regular season game versus the final game of the season (Superbowl)

You can see the same thing happen in Canada (on a different scale of course) with CBC streaming Hockey Night In Canada regular season games on Saturday nights and then playoff games when the regular season ends.

During the regular season the stream is rock solid and I can watch the game perfectly on my monitor but come the playoffs, depending on the matchup I want to watch, the stream quality crashes and burns under the load that's placed on it.

Providing the bandwidth for the games isn't free and since we aren't paying to watch the stream, it's not like we have any leverage to ask for improvements

NefCanuck

rchandra
Stargate Universe fan
Premium Member
join:2000-11-09
14225-2105

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Premium Member

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If only multicast were better implemented...many of the capacity issues would "go away."
rchandra

rchandra to SpaethCo

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to SpaethCo
Seriously...I've been giving some thought to this since I saw this article. It's probably a lot to ask that Internet providers have a reasonable multicast implementation, especially for more than a single segment (such as a single CMTS).

I wonder if it would be feasible to distribute session encryption keys much the same way they're determined/exchanged for IPSec (IKE). This sort of thing alone (IP broadcasting) could be the single biggest, best reason to transition to IPv6 as quickly as possible. The more vast address space would be necessary to implement something like the ability to send specific multicasts...not just well-known ones like NTP, RAs, and such. Imagine if you will that ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, USA Network, Lifetime, HBO, SyFy, Discovery, etc. all had their own multicast address, and that all one has to do is send messages to join the multicast group, possibly also doing some sort of encryption key exchange if necessary for entitlement purposes.