AOL Developing Cheap Switch for Audio Streaming

legaleagll writes: "According to a Fortune magazine article and a follow-up article on ZDNet, AOL is developing a cheap switch that can handle streaming audio for 10,000 users, versus current technology of 100 - 1,000 users per box depending on expense of system. The code name for the product is Ultravox and was apparantly spurred into existence because RealNetworks is now offering internet service for cheaper than AOL. I'm a little skeptical because I'm not sure how the use of an intelligent router would eliminate the need for the expensive systems to stream the audio. Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?"

Comments

Multicast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that moving the streaming onto the switch refers to multicast...At that point the bandwidth issues for supporting 10,000 users become much more manageable. Now, just have to find those 10,000 users on multicast enabled networks...

MBone

[Mr. McGibby]

Everytime I hear about streaming media again, I think back to the mbone. Why give a stream to every single user when you can intelligently stream media using the very thing that makes the internet what it is, it's ability to route packets to their destination? Why should I have to send out 1000 copies of the *same damn thing* over my wire when I could just send one copy and let the routers send copies to subnets that are going to use it?

Whatever happened to the mbone!?!?!?!?

serves AOL interests

[DiscoBiscuit]

I can see why AOL would want to do this, seeing as they seem they provide the bandwidth (seemingly for free) to some big streamers like digitallyimported.com who have thousands of unicast streams at 128Kbit. Never quite seen whats in for them myself, but kudos to them for doing it anyway.

The expense is Real Audio and bandwidth

[AIXadmin]

Last I checked the two biggest problems with massive streaming audio were 1) the high cost of a real audio license, and 2) the high cost of bandwidth. The latter might not be a problem for AOL . But the former is.

AOL could be writing this switch to use MPEG-4 which would solve both problems to some degree. Consider also how much money AOL has to put into this project. The ROI could be huge.

Number of users

[pjrc]

can handle streaming audio for 10,000 users, versus current technology of 100 - 1,000 users per box depending on expense of system

Apple claims that their QuickTime Streaming Server can send 4000 silultaneous streams. That's a lot more than 100 to 1000.

It's also available as an open-souce project, depending on your exact definition of open-source (not Free for all uses, apparantly).

Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?"

Yep, but if the box is streaming the same exact stream to lots of users, it could save a whole lot of expensive bandwidth by transmitting one copy of the stream over the long-haul backbone lines, where presumably a switch nearer to a cluster of users could transmit individual copies to the users over the "last mile".

I don't know if that's what they're really doing, but it'd be the smart thing to do. Bandwidth on the internet backbone is a lot more expensive than servers and switches.