Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company

[Max <perldork () webwizarddesign com>]

Was PBS one of the companies you are referring to?  A colleague of
mine worked as a developer on a project at PBS in the 90s that used
the blanking interval for Internet transmissio - very cool stuff.

On 5/19/11, Robert Bonomi <bonomi () mail r-bonomi com> wrote:
> > From nanog-bounces+bonomi=mail.r-bonomi.com () nanog org  Wed May 18 16:12:17
> > 2011
> > Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 14:53:10 -0600
> > From: Brielle Bruns <bruns () 2mbit com>
> > To: nanog () nanog org
> > Subject: Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than
> > Any
> >      Other Company
> >
> > On 5/18/11 2:33 PM, Dorn Hetzel wrote:
> > > If we're really talking efficiency, the "popular" stuff should probably
> > > stream out over the bird of your choice (directv, etc) because it's
> > > hard to beat millions of dishes and dvr's and no cable plant.
> > >
> > > Then what won't fit on the bird goes unicast IP from the nearest CDN.
> > > Kind of like the "on demand over broadband" on my satellite box.  Their
> > > selection sucks, but the model is valid.
> >
> >
> >
> > If someone hadn't mentioned already, there used to be a usenet provider
> > that delivered a full feed via Satellite.
>
> There were, at different times, two companies that did that.  Both went
> under because expenses exceeded income.
>
> The one that was _much_ more interesting was the one that Lauren Weinstein
> had a hand in.  It piggy-backed a Usenet feed in the vertical blanking
> interval of several big "independant" TV stations -- ones that were
> carried by practically every cable company in the country.  Distribution
> to the cable companies was via satellite, but the USENET feed, being
> _part_ of the video signal, consumed _zero_ additional bandwidth, and
> rode the satellite links for free.
>
> To get the feed, all you needed was a TV tuner with 'video out', and the
> purpose-huilt decoder box that extracted the vertical interval data.
>
> This service died as the independants moved to encrypted transmission,
> because the encryption did _not_ perserve anything in the 'blanking'
> timeslot. only the 'viewable' field-image was trasmitted, _as_ a full-field
> image.  Sync, blanking, etc. was _locally_ generated on the receiving end.
>
> An "elegant" idea, done in by changing technology.   *sigh*