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Too much effort for too little rewardCuban 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. | |
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Re: Too much effort for too little reward 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. | |
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Re: Too much effort for too little rewardYou'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. | |
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whataname
Anon
2012-Feb-7 6:01 pm
Re: Too much effort for too little rewardsaid 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. | |
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| | | | steven s
Premium Member
join:2002-09-14
Dearborn, MI |
steven s
Premium Member
2012-Feb-7 7:22 pm
Re: Too much effort for too little rewardThe 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. | |
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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. | |
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| | | | |  elwoodbluesElwood Blues
Premium Member
join:2006-08-30
Somewhere in |
Re: Too much effort for too little rewardsaid 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. | |
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| |  SpaethCoDigital Plumber
MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN |
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. | |
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Re: Too much effort for too little rewardthe 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. | |
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| | | | SpaethCoDigital Plumber
MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN |
Re: Too much effort for too little rewardsaid 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. | |
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Re: Too much effort for too little rewardsaid 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. | |
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to SpaethCo
This is why we have multicast. | |
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| | | | | | SpaethCoDigital Plumber
MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN |
Re: Too much effort for too little rewardsaid 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. | |
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| | | | | | |  rchandraStargate Universe fan
Premium Member
join:2000-11-09
14225-2105
EnGenius EAP1250
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rchandra
Premium Member
2012-Feb-9 11:07 pm
Re: Too much effort for too little rewardSeriously...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. | |
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to SpaethCo
If only multicast were better implemented...many of the capacity issues would "go away." | |
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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. | |
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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. | |
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| |  elios
join:2005-11-15
Springfield, MO |
elios
Member
2012-Feb-7 1:45 pm
Re: Too much effort for too little rewardsounds 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 | |
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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 | |
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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. | |
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Re: Too much effort for too little rewardsaid 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. | |
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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 | |
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 norbert26
Premium Member
join:2010-08-10
Warwick, RI |
I streamed itI streamed it but watched on the regular NBC channel for HD. During ads i could jump to the stream which ran behind the broadcast to catch a play. However the stream jittered and stuttered a lot . This cleared up in the very end as everyone ditched the stream. Picture quality was in the abyss as well with only 350k stream i did not try for higher as i had the HD broadcast over the TV. Outcome of the game was a whole different matter . | |
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nonymous (banned)
join:2003-09-08
Glendale, AZ |
nonymous (banned)
Member
2012-Feb-7 12:50 pm
This is like a once a year big time event. Hard for streaminStreaming like Netflix or other stuff can be planned for in capacity.
This is a once a year event that if online really worked would get slammed big time. Like quality video from internet to TV. Putting capacity in place for an annual very large event in some ways is harder than capacity for 24/7 use. | |
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stufried
Premium Member
2012-Feb-7 12:53 pm
Re: This is like a once a year big time event. Hard for streaminAmazon leases capacity on its servers for exactly this type of one off usage. You can offload to them.
What I find amazing was the problems they had licensing commercials. "Hey Coca Cola we also want to put your add on our stream feed of the game at no extra charge." Is Coke really going to charge extra to broadcast their commercial? Is there a huge fear that pirates in China are going be selling bootleg DVDs of Clint Eastwood's Chrysler Commercial? I think NBC needs to replace whoever was their negotiator. | |
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Re: This is like a once a year big time event. Hard for streaminsaid by stufried:Amazon leases capacity on its servers for exactly this type of one off usage. You can offload to them.
Amazon can only go so far. What you really need is a good CDN like Akamai or Level 3. | |
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Re: This is like a once a year big time event. Hard for streaminL3 was used this time around AFAIK. L3 + Akamai would've been even better. Throw in some LLNW for good measure  | |
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Re: This is like a once a year big time event. Hard for streaminsaid by iansltx:L3 was used this time around AFAIK. L3 + Akamai would've been even better. Throw in some LLNW for good measure
Yeah, probably their origin servers couldn't keep up. I know people who work there... wouldn't surprise me. | |
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to stufried
"no extra charge" was probably off the table | |
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| | 25139889 (banned)
join:2011-10-25
Toledo, OH |
to stufried
Coke didn't get paid for their ad to start off with. They paid to have it played. | |
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Re: This is like a once a year big time event. Hard for streaminWow dude! Right over your head. Nice! | |
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| nonymous (banned)
join:2003-09-08
Glendale, AZ |
nonymous (banned)
Member
2012-Feb-7 1:07 pm
I do know about offloading. Thing is the penny pinchers not wanting to pay more. Sure we can do it in house with our everyday servers.  The big sports arenas in Phoenix metro are way overwired for everyday use. I do mean way way over wired. Thing is they do get used more than once a year and have other events, even though the other events usually come no where near hitting capacity. This Superbowl on the net is more like a Barret Jackson car auction or PIR before the upgrade. Has some infrastructure in place all year then really build out for the event. Then at least through out the year the basic infrastructure is used for other events at times with still the last feet build out. Probably easier now also. Wasn't that long ago running copper the last feet. Bet if still had that job just run a few fiber cables. Now mix in cheap ass executives at TV and cheap ass and do not want their ads stolen executives. Try to get funding for off loading. Way way easier than the sometimes build out for events at a Barret auction even with basics in place. | |
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 ctceo
Premium Member
join:2001-04-26
South Bend, IN |
ctceo
Premium Member
2012-Feb-7 12:58 pm
Planned ScarcityIf they would have had multiple broadcasters, they wouldn't have had that problem. Have Onlive, Hulu, uverse, comcast and a few others and this wouldn't have been an issue. | |
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Re: Planned ScarcityIt was on Hulu. | |
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 jazzy_
join:2004-01-27
Charleston, SC |
jazzy_
Member
2012-Feb-7 1:00 pm
eh wasn't too bad for meIt streamed fine on Chrome for me. But there was no halftime or famed adverts. Which bittorrent more than made up for. The quality of the stream was pretty good too. Only time it got a bit blurry was when I was downloading the halftime show lol. | |
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 Oh_NoTrogglus normalus
join:2011-05-21
Chicago, IL |
Oh_No
Member
2012-Feb-7 1:28 pm
I watched the NBC Stream - It was pretty good.I watched the entire superbowl on my 47in TV with the NBC stream.
At first it was grainy. I closed it and reopened it and then it was pretty crisp of a picture.
It also had 4 different camera angles you chould change to.
The only issue was it would not go "full screen" because it had a stats bar on the sides, but that did not matter.
As for lag I would not know as I did not have another live signal to compare it to.
For some reason they did not show the halftime show, but no one missed anything there. Who cares about madonna lip syncing to a song.
I thought the stream was done well. | |
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 Smith6612
MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY ·Charter
Ubee EU2251
Ubiquiti UAP-IW-HD
Ubiquiti UniFi AP-AC-HD
4 edits |
NBC Goofed upI know the Superbowl is kind of that once a year, 5 hour event, but I know they goofed up. I was watching the game on a very fast connection at the time in a location where traditional TV was not available. The connection was Gigabit, was testing at Gigabit and I was doing nothing more than 350Kbps to the Superbowl stream. It basically was a let-down since it looked like it was being encoded on a toaster and broadcasted on a farm of toasters. 
So, needless to say, the fact that the player went to the same advertisements every few minutes, and the player had ads along the side, I really think they could have done better. Akamai, Amazon, Limelight, whoever have the capacity on demand to get this stuff moving. NBC I don't think footed the bill to make it look like something that wasn't what I used to watch on dial-up (hypothetically).
Anyways, to give NBC a break, these live streaming players are a joke. When they were first starting to take off, you could decide to stream content with a quality of whatever the player determined would work best based on your connection and based on the stream demand, or you could over-ride the often crappy netcode of the player and pick the quality yourself. With the exception of Netflix's player, which allows you to select the quality (but Netflix has nothing to do with this in the first place), none of these players, even those at ESPN3 (who had these options as well) allow you to pick the quality. Even if the servers are having no problems with capacity, you're at the mercy of these crappy players. I miss the days of not being called an idiot by a media player and actually being able to choose a bitrate I knew would please what I wanted to view, even if my connection was not fast enough to handle it.
I will commend them for at least offering up a live, decent looking stream (if you could get the high quality feed...) for free this year. They didn't do that for the Olympics which was a huge disappointment. So that is at least a step in the right direction.
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So A Broadcaster Wasn't Very Good At......broadcasting in the 21st Century?
Imagine my surprise.
The entrenched media types (broadcast TV & radio, cable & satellite operators, MPAA, RIAA, etc.) could learn from history, had they a mind to. A long time ago the railroads tried to fend-off the up-and-coming airline industry by refusing to build railroad terminus' adjacent to airports. So now trucks do all of what trains could've done at least some of.
Oops. | |
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 RockCake
Premium Member
join:2005-07-12
Woodbridge, VA |
RockCake
Premium Member
2012-Feb-7 2:33 pm
No stream for me...I watched on TV, but for the heck of it I tried to stream via Chrome, Firefox and (ugh) IE, and couldn't do it, yet Netflix worked just fine. | |
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All roads lead to Silverlight DebacleFunny, a site relying on proprietary Microsoft technology (Silverlight) bombing under load.... Who would have thunk?
Hint to NBC - Microsoft does not make reliable software. Nor do they make software that scales well.... | |
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Re: All roads lead to Silverlight Debaclesaid by itguy05:Nor do they make software that scales well.... Really? Ever heard of Server 2008 DataCenter edition? How about Exchange Server? Perhaps SQL Server with a multi-terrabyte database with replication? I doubt it was Silverlight as the scaling on your desktop is not an issue. | |
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Re: All roads lead to Silverlight Debaclesaid by raythompsontn:said by itguy05:Nor do they make software that scales well.... Really? Ever heard of Server 2008 DataCenter edition? How about Exchange Server? Perhaps SQL Server with a multi-terrabyte database with replication? I doubt it was Silverlight as the scaling on your desktop is not an issue. Exchange Server is a huge POS for mail. When you scale it you need huge amounts of servers, storage, and it's extremely complicated. And since mail is all stored in a database restoring mail is a pain, as is corruption. Ask the London Stock Exchange about their failed SQL server attempt (» blogs.computerworld.com/ ··· platform). Hint: It didn't perform or scale well. It probably wasn't the Silverlight on the desktop that was the issue. Rather the required Windows infrastructure on the backend had a hard time coping. Microsoft knows the low-mid end very well. But they know little about scaling. Their answer is always: Throw more servers at it. | |
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 SysOp
join:2001-04-18
Atlanta, GA
4 edits |
SysOp
Member
2012-Feb-7 7:22 pm
DRM and Unicast the problem?Considering SilverLight supports multicast. What went wrong? | |
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 JeffMD
join:2002-08-16
Edgewater, FL |
JeffMD
Member
2012-Feb-7 9:36 pm
insert subject hereuhmm.. I had no problem with the stream on my chrome browser. Netflix also uses silverlight. It was actually a good experience for the little time I used it (I was watching it on tv and saw that they were offering a live internet stream as well mid game). It seemed to offer an auto throttling data rate like netflix so I was able to get a high data rate stream. The only thing is it wasn't a smooth experience cause it was using to much cpu on my laptop which has abit of a low powered 1.6ghz C2D. | |
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Dapperdanman
Anon
2012-Feb-8 12:30 am
NBC probably failed at thinking big(screen)My guess to the low quality of the stream was the old school thinking that everyone who watches "online" watches on their computer. They probably felt that for the cost and the output the speeds they put out were fine for the much smaller screen of a computer/laptop/tablet/etc.
What they failed to realize is the hundreds of thousands of us that are putting our computers on our TVs. And with TVs becoming more like a giant monitor for a built-in computer (look at this year's CES TVs) this is ancient thinking.
That and Comcast/NBC would rather not let go of their subscribers just yet. | |
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Ten years ago......I posted a full-quality HD OTA rip of the Superbowl halftime show to Usenet. Just to give you some indication of how far behind the official channels are.
Granted, it wasn't real-time. In fact I only had 128 Kbps upload back then... | |
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sdasfasdfasf
Anon
2012-Feb-8 10:47 am
Look at the other side of the Coin...NFL & NBC had to be in agreement to stream the Super Bowl live.
NBC could have easily said no.
2.1 Million people watched it according to NBC.
Regardless, if it was a failure or not in some eyes, it's still groundbreaking in that it's the largest world sporting event ever streamed live, and there will be lessons learned by NBC and other content providers on how to improve the experience to make it better next time.
It can only lead to better Streaming in the future... | |
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