Re: The scale of streaming video on the Internet.

[Ken A <ka () pacific net>]

On 12/3/2010 8:16 AM, Neil Harris wrote:
> On 02/12/10 20:21, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> > Comcast has around ~15 million high speed Internet subscribers (based on
> > year old data, I'm sure it is higher), which means at peak usage around
> > 0.3% of all Comcast high speed users would be watching.
> >
> > That's an interesting number, but let's run back the other way.
> > Consider what happens if folks cut the cord, and watch Internet
> > only TV. I went and found some TV ratings:
> >
> > http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/30/tv-ratings-broadcast-top-25-sunday-night-football-dancing-with-the-stars-finale-two-and-a-half-men-ncis-top-week-10-viewing/73784
> >
> >
> > Sunday Night Football at the top last week, with 7.1% of US homes
> > watching. That's over 23 times as many folks watching as the 0.3% in
> > our previous math! Ok, 23 times 150Gbps.
> >
> > 3.45Tb/s.
> >
> > Yowzer. That's a lot of data. 345 10GE ports for a SINGLE TV show.
> >
> > But that's 7.1% of homes, so scale up to 100% of homes and you get
> > 48Tb/sec, that's right 4830 simultaneous 10GE's if all of Comcast's
> > existing high speed subs dropped cable and watched the same shows over
> > the Internet.
> >
> > I think we all know that streaming video is large. Putting the real
> > numbers to it shows the real engineering challenges on both sides,
> > generating and sinking the content, and why comapnies are fighting so
> > much over it.
>
> You might be interested in the EU-funded P2P-NEXT research initiative,
> which is creating a P2P system capable of handling P2P broadcasting at
> massive scale:
>
> http://www.p2p-next.org/

Veetle uses p2p too. It's stream isn't quite 'light speed'; perhaps 30 
seconds delayed.
Ken


> -- Neil
>
> (full disclosure: I'm associated with one of the participants in the
> project)

--
Ken Anderson
Pacific Internet - http://www.pacific.net