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HDTV Feeds of Internet 2
Floydian Slip pointed us to a news.com story that talks about some researchers who have successfully sent HDTV over I2. Sort of a proof of concept thing for using the new network for broadcasting TV. It'll still be an ungodly amount of time before its practical, but I'm convinced on-demand media (music is already happening, TV will come) is the future. I love the idea of not dedicating a whole bookcase to VCRs, CDs, and DVDs, so I'm excited to see it.
I work on a similar video-streaming project at Østfold College in Norway, and it is my belief that On Demand Video will be available over the Internet sooner than we might think.
:) The boxes never crashes either.
:)
The project I work on are doing live video-broadcasts of two TV-channels over IPv4, using multicast (read MBONE), with bandwidth consumption up to 2Mbit/s per stream. We are using standard PentiumII workstations running Linux-2.2.12 and bttv grabbercards throughout the whole project. As long as you've got the bandwidth it works perfectly.
Today NASA is doing multicast-transmissions of about 20 or so educational programs. They are using MPEG-1 video, MP3 audio, 1.5 Mbit/s streams. I receive those streams perfectly at my office in Norway (other side of the world, plain old IPv4 internet, no fancy stuff, just _bandwidth_ and multicasting).
DVD quality MPEG-2 streaming uses bandwidth up to 6-8 Mbit/s. This is the same as the european Digital TV standard. The next goal of my project is to start streaming live MPEG-2 encoded video over the Internet. We will start doing this before christmas.
Alot of ISP's (at least in Norway) are starting to build Wireless (WaveLan) Wide Area Networks with bandwidth ranging from 2Mbit to 11Mbit per second.
The theoretical bandwidth of one fiber-optic strand is reaching the Terrabit level and rising. As the telcos (and others) are starting to give fiber to the end user, the bandwith of the internet will reach Petabit level.
Oh and by the way: MBONE is not dead. IETF declared Multicasting to be a part of any full IP implementation, so MBONE is not something other than IP, MBONE is a part of IP, it's just that alot of ISP's has not understood this yet. Multicasting is also an integrated part of IPv6, and IPv6 is dependent of Multicasting to a much larger degree than IPv4.
I believe Internet Video On Demand will develop very similar to mp3. Here is a short scenario of how I think this will develop the next two or three years.
- First computers will become fast enough to encode and decode DVD quality MPEG-2 in realtime. (1-2 years)
- Then the bandwidth will be available to stream and download video, over the network. (2-5 years)
- After that some people will find a way to rip the decrypted video of DVD-disks. (now-1 year)
- Then people will start to encode favorite movies and TV-shows themselves and you and I can download all episodes of Seinfeld and Babylon 5 of the net, and then the television and movie people will have a very hard time sleeping at night. (now: mpeg1, 2 years: mpeg-2)
ust my 2 cents of humble opinion.
Will they be able to handle the demand? That will be the true question.
Werd.
Up to now, the internet has had record companies to deal with regarding MP3s; when the bandwith becomes available (along with the requisite HDTV technology), we're all gonna be up against the movie studios as well.
Downloading a shaky copy of Star Wars in glorious 640x480 is one thing, but when a proper (watchable) movies is available, there's the distinct possibility that people'll watch that instead of spending their hard-earned dosh on cinema tickets.
The pondering on how do deal with this should start now...
(yes, btw, I know that the movie studios and music studios are in a lot of cases the same people, but there aren't many artists that can bring in $100m).
The biggest issue I have with this is that all of these "partners" are interested in providing nothing more than essentially an online catalog for us to buy more garbage that none of us really need all that much. I guess that's the way the world is turning (or has already become). I'm not too thrilled about having to "rent" a movie over I2, providing marketing data to the studios, and then having ads jammed down my throat in a banner at the bottom of the screen while I watch the movie. I'll stick to DVDs and flat rate watching for as long as possible, thanks - that way I don't provide as much marketing data (if any) and I can watch it without nasty PPV prices.
Come see the Internet2: Your online entertainment and shopping complex - all from the comfort of your sofa. Don't worry, your marketing data is secure with us. *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink*