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Vint Cerf Says Fix the Net With More Pipe
CWmike writes "While ISPs may fret about Netflix, Hulu and other streaming media services saturating their bandwidth, Internet forefather Vint Cerf has a simple answer for this potential problem: Increase bandwidth exponentially. With sufficient bandwidth, streaming video services of prerecorded content wouldn't be necessary, said the now-technology evangelist at Google. With sufficient throughput, the entire file of a movie or television show could be downloaded in a fraction of the time that it would take to stream the content. Cerf, speaking at Juniper Network's Nextwork conference, spoke about the company's decision to outfit Kansas City with fiber-optic connections that Google claims will be 100 times faster than today's services. The purpose of the project was 'to demonstrate what happens when you have gigabit speeds available,' Cerf said. 'Some pretty dramatic applications are possible.' One obvious application is greater access to high-definition video, he explained. 'When you are watching video today, streaming is a very common practice. At gigabit speeds, a video file [can be transferred] faster than you can watch it,' he said. 'So rather than [receiving] the bits out in a synchronous way, instead you could download the hour's worth of video in 15 seconds and watch it at your leisure.' He adds: 'It actually puts less stress on the network to have the higher speed of operation.'"
(It's today.)
I don't think you've caught the point. It isn't merely that 100% of the network won't be required if we are faster. If the connection is fast enough, the video doesn't have to be streamed through difficult to throttle udp but instead can be transferred as a network friendly tcp transfer. UDP video transfer is a dirty hack implemented because it was the only way to get video of watchable quality through. We are no longer in the days of choppy unwatchable video on the internet and if we move away from dirty hacks like udp streaming I doubt anyone would go back to it.
But people will just want to stream 1080p and then 2K
There isn't much difference here: 2K is 2048x1080, which is less than 7% bigger than standard 1080p.
and then 4K video
We can solve that once 4K video cameras become affordable for home use.
And can somebody explain to me why downloading a video in 1 gigantic burst is better than streaming it at a more steady rate?
If the entire work is cached locally, fast forward and rewind don't require a round trip to a server, and they don't require transcoding to create a new keyframe at the seek point. Nor will re-watching a video require sending it again.