On Feb 9, 2013, at 6:45 AM, fredrik danerklint <fredan-na...@fredan.se> wrote:
> No. Streaming from services, like Netflix, HBO, etc..., is what's > coming. We need to prepare for the bandwidth they are going to be > using. Then work on your HTTP caching infrastructure. All these services already use a proprietary form of HTTP adaptive streaming, either MSFT, Adobe, or Apple. These technologies are being unified by DASH in the MPEG/ISO standards bodies. Adaptive HTTP chunk streaming gives you the best of multicast-like and cached VoD behavior, exploiting the temporal locality of popularity in content while not requiring multicast. As a content publisher, I must say it works wonders for us so far, even with just two bitrates. There is a huge HTTP caching infrastructure out there in businesses, schools, and other orgs that is unused by other video transports; even plain HTTP downloads usually overrun cache object size limits. The Olympic streaming in particular showed how well HTTP chunk video can scale; dozen of screens in my org showed the same content all day from local cache, with no noticeable spikes on our transit links. Is HTTP as efficient a protocol as possible for transporting video? No, but 1K of headers per 1M of content chunk puts it within 0.1% of netcat. And "working now with widely deployed infrastructure" beats "stuck in Internet Draft forever".
