[ NNSquad ] Re: NY Times: People are watching much more online video

["nick hatch" <nicholas.hatch@gmail.com>]

As someone who used to work for a university's residential network, this doesn't surprise me at all.

Even as of March 2007, I was seeing 30%+ of our total bandwidth being used for flash video sites during peak hours (~6pm to midnight for our users). P2P was easy to control with a worst-effort delivery policy. There was no similar solution for flash video.

Even with access to cheap bandwidth in Seattle, the cost to increase available bandwidth tended to be cost-prohibitive. Many colleges and universities don't even have the luxury of purchasing bandwidth cheaply from major metro exchanges.

The economics of online video work out much differently for MSOs like Comcast; content-delivery networks and settlement-free peering are easy and cheap to them. It's the last mile which is the problem. For us, the problem was the exact opposite.

I see Comcast's move to cap at 250GB as a sticking their toes in the water, and perhaps trying to set a precident at the same time. I don't see a techincal reason for the caps. They don't even differentiate between outbound/inbound traffic. Considering their network architecture where last-mile egress bandwidth is so scarce, that alone makes the whole move seem like a farce. 

I absolutely agree that whatever they're hedging against in the future is sure to have some anticompetive tint to it.

-Nick

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com> wrote:

The implications of this story for bandwidth caps and their potential
for anticompetitive results are obvious.

I continue to be bemused by the mainstream press' seeming disconnect
between stories that on one hand note the massive rise in Internet
video and the launch of new Internet video services, and on the other
hand stories that detail ISP plans to limit Internet usage -- in
some cases drastically.

These two essentially contradictory aspects are rarely considered in
the same stories.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/online-video-and-our-attention-span-get-longer

--Lauren--
NNSquad Moderator