NYT on video on demand, via mail

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Wong, Brian" <brianwong () dwt com>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 13:27:00 -0700
To: "'Farber, Dave'" <dave () farber net>
Subject: NYT on video on demand, via mail

Dave, you are quoted in this article which includes interesting estimates of
total Internet daily traffic flow and DVD rental physical (mail) data
transmission.

- Brian - 


New York Times September 23, 2002

The Packaging of Video on Demand
By PETER WAYNER 

IT has been a long-cherished dream of the digital age: video on demand.
That's the term used for the delivery of cinema-quality movies to television
households, with each consumer choosing what to watch and when to watch it.

But the technical challenges have been a deterrent. The main obstacle for
cable systems has been creating and maintaining a sufficiently large
database of movies. The problem for Internet systems has been network
circuits too narrow to carry data files the size of movies, which can be
four billion to nine billion bytes each.

In the last year, though, a flourishing digital video-on-demand market has
developed, thanks to the least probable of carriers: the United States
Postal Service.

Because of cost advantages and, in some cases, even an edge in speed, the
Postal Service, FedEx
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m
arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp%26symb=FDX>  and other
physical delivery services now seem to be the dominant mechanism for
bringing data-rich digital content, on demand, into the nation's households.

The secret of the Postal Service's digital success is the DVD
<snip> 
Andrew Odlyzko, the director of the Digital Technology Center at the
University of Minnesota, says that the cost to the service provider of
transmitting a data file the size of a typical DVD movie over the Internet
could be nearly $20. What's more, a home user with a 56-kilobit-a-second
modem could wait two weeks for a movie to download - much longer than the
three days the post office estimates it would take to mail a DVD coast to
coast.

<snip> 
Assuming that the average disc Netflix sends out contains 8 gigabytes, that
one company alone may be mailing out about 1,500 trillion bytes, or
terabytes, each day.

Estimates vary on how much data the Internet carries in North America each
day. RHK, a research company in San Francisco, says the number exceeds 4,000
terabytes, while Professor Odlyzko argues that the Internet daily traffic
flow is only about 2,000 terabytes - or only about a third more data than
the amount Netflix ships.

Of course, Netflix is not the only company mailing rental DVD's. Video Store
magazine estimates that, beyond rentals, about 1.5 million DVD's, or 800
terabytes, are sold each day through Internet or telephone orders and
dispatched by mail, FedEx or other parcel service.

David Farber, a University of Pennsylvania computer scientist who was an
early architect of the Internet and is a Netflix customer, says that he does
not expect the Internet to catch up with the DVD Pony Express any time soon.

"It's going to be years before we get the bandwidth," Mr. Farber said. "When
I sit back, I want the quality that comes with a DVD; I don't want to look
at a 2-by-2 hole, which is what you get with the Internet" when watching
video on a computer. Where the Net pays, he says, is when people say, "I
want it, and want it now."

Meanwhile, watch for high-quality digital movies coming to a mailbox near
you. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/23/technology/23NECO.html
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/23/technology/23NECO.html>


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/