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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.'"
Give her more pipe!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
'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.'
Sure, it naturally would stand to reason that the operations (like streaming video) that currently require 100% utilization on today's network might only require a fraction of that on tomorrow's much faster network. The problem is, tomorrow we won't be happy with the same old video we used to stream, we are going to want a super high-def version with 8 channel stereo sound and in-line twitter commentary plus it will have to update our facebook status every time we pause it to go to the bathroom... And then we will be back to streaming at 100% capacity again, wondering when the next leap in networking will let us do block downloads again.
Seriously, Vint Cerf? This is the best idea you can muster? This is the same problem/solution cycle the internet has been locked in for its entire existence.
(It's today.)
The Wii won't be able to hold an entire downloaded movie --- unless one makes putting in a blank 8GB SD card before watching --- I don't think that will go over well, nor do I think the copyright holders will like the idea of a single monolithic file being made available.
The problem isn't merely a technical one...
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
We will not get 2k video, let alone 4k, any time soon. Most people don't even need 1080p. (With my set size and seating position I'm right on the line myself.)
Bursting the video rather than streaming it leads to less overhead. Clearly it matters how much less. If you can do it with UDP and don't drop many packets then the difference could be substantial. However, AFAICT most video streaming services utilize HTTP so that they can be accelerated by commodity caching systems.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Listen to the man, he knows of that which he speaks.
More bandwidth may not solve all the problems, but it'll sure as hell solve some of them.
I don't know how many of you still remember the dialup days, or even used dial-up. When the schoolkids got home, they'd start hitting AOL and you'd notice the lag.
It's not as bad now, what with me having a 25/25Mbps line. But there's still a very wide range of criminal acts that I'd perform to have my own 1 Gbps line.
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.
It may not DL an entire movie, but it could grab a significant chunk of it and let you watch it without jitter or pixelation, and then DL the next chunk when you have a few minutes of video from the previous chunk.
The copyright holders are going to whine and moan no matter how it's done, so the best thing is to ignore them and do it the right way. It's just as easy to capture a streamed movie as it is one that arrive as a single piece. The thing they need to get over is that once people can rely on having a resource available to them on the net, there's less motivation for them to hoard it on a local drive. If movies only cost a couple dollars, were stored on some upstream server farm that would shoot it down to me on demand, I'd buy a hell of a lot more movies. I'd bet that many other people would, too.
unfortunately there is no way this will happen. There are too many important competing interests which act at the beaurocratic/governance level which are anti-bandwidth.
MPAA/RIAA don't want people to stream quickly because they fear content being stolen
CIA/FBI don't want increased bandwidth because they need(or think they need) to be able to monitor and index all communication (TIA)
ATT/Verizon and other telecoms don't want to because it represents a cost that will interfere with their milking of customers
Comcast doesn't want it because it will interfere with their control over content
Everyone just wants to stay status quo or worse. This will never happen.
*Han voice*
Sure, you can download that big old file kid, but whose going to store it? You?
*Luke voice*
You bet I could! I've get me a big old hard drive right here. We don't have to sit here and listen...
*Ben voice*
Shut up.
Anything is possible given time and money.