Re: Sunday traffic curiosity

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> On Mar 23, 2020, at 10:14 , Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 23/Mar/20 05:51, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
>
> > How do you see that happening? Are people going to stop wanting to watch live,
> > or are teams going to somehow play asynchronously (e.g. Lakers vs. Celtics,
> > the Lakers play on November 5 at 6 PM and the Celtics play on November 8
> > at 11 AM)?
> >
> > Further, it would be more accurate to say that events with large live audiences
> > are the only thing propping up the “old economy” and sport is probably by far
> > the largest current application of live streaming.
>
> I'll admit, this is not an easy one to solve.
>
> The problem you have is the kids who are driving the new economy have little to no interest in live sport. Old timers 
> like ourselves still like watching live sport, and even better, betting on it for those who consider that an extra 
> sport of sport. The kids are not into all of that, and despite the growth of online sporting conventions (eSports, 
> Fortnite tournaments, Twitch binging, e.t.c.), it doesn't even register as a rounding-error on the balance sheets of 
> the traditional sports establishment. To you pysch. majors, that means, "We - the old guard - don't care about any of 
> that :-)”.

That hasn’t been my observation at any of the local sports bars. I actually have little to no interest in live sport 
(except maybe the occasional curling match, yeah, I’m not just old, I’m odd).

Live sport seems quite popular among kids and millennials, at least in the US.

> Linear TV networks know that most homes moving to VoD would prefer a sports-only package, so that they can pick that 
> up from them and keep movies and series on VoD. However, the linear TV networks are leveraging that to keep pushing 
> their traditional bouquets because then they have the justification to "charge that little bit extra" in order to 
> deliver all the other content that sits side-by-side with sports.

Personally, I wish I could stop paying the “fee for access to local sports” that my linear provider charges every 
month. Nonetheless, the younger people around me supposedly driving this new economy seem very focused on their love of 
live sports.

> As I've been saying before, the Coronavirus has amplified and accelerated the realization that the old economy will 
> not survive in this new digital era. As this applies to sport, Formula One have cancelled a heap of grand prix 
> weekends this season, but this has forced them to, for the first time, hold eSports options, just this week:
>
>     https://www.grandprix247.com/2020/03/23/zhou-wins-virtual-bahrain-grand-prix/ 
> <https://www.grandprix247.com/2020/03/23/zhou-wins-virtual-bahrain-grand-prix/>
>
> Is that a sign of things to come, yes and no. "No" in that there is simply too much money with the traditional setup 
> to put aside for the bigger picture, but "Yes" in that during times like these, there might be way for folk to get 
> their fix, unless you are a  purist. But even then, how long can you hold out for if another pandemic in 20 years 
> loses us 2 whole years?

Well, for the moment, live sports aren’t happening, at least locally, so how to televise them isn’t exactly an issue. I 
don’t think eSports will replace traditional sports, I think that for now, the sports organizations facing a sudden and 
dramatic loss of revenue and progressively more distressed fans are grasping at straws to find ways to keep their fans 
engaged, hoping for a near-term return to normal revenue activities. Remains to be seen how well that will work.

> One could speak of hybrid solutions where you watch linear TV, but then engage with the match/program online. In 
> 2013, I saw a number of equipment vendors developing walled-garden solutions around this, and it was great. But as we 
> all know, the kids gravitate to simpler solutions that offer obvious value, are downloadable from a public market 
> store, and cost zero. So now, watching anything on TV means engaging via Twitter, not via some walled-garden app only 
> open to a few, ships with a price tag, and crashes more than it is usable.

These have already been tried in a variety of ways, usually with limited success.

This idea that things can cost zero is the most frustrating part. I’m so tired of not being able to buy apps instead of 
rent them. I’m fed up to here with apps that come with ridiculous loads of advertising.
This shift from an ownership economy to a rental economy is terrible and I wish that we could somehow educate the kids 
on how much more it actually costs them.

Possibly the worst artifact is the “If you’re not paying, you’re the product” and the number of millennials that view 
the surveillance economy with a kind of “Yeah, so what? Privacy is so 1990.” attitude.


> Where all the VoD providers are letting linear TV networks keep running away with this model is by all of them 
> chasing us to give them our US$10/month for what they feel is the killer VoD service in the world. As I've mentioned 
> before on this list, consumer fatigue due to the "yet-another-new-VoD-provider-today" syndrome is growing. For as 
> long as each VoD provider is competing for our business, linear TV will remain relevant because it's easier and 
> cheaper for a consumer to give a linear TV provider one cheque       that covers a variety of channels, vs. paying 
> US$10/month for every VoD provider. And now major sports events and/or channels are also in the VoD game, each of 
> them also charging US$10/month. It starts to add up pretty quick, and in the end, the case for linear TV is only 
> strengthened.

Yep… It’s also growing because as they fragment further and further (e.g. Disney launching their own and pulling 
content off Netflix), each one sucks just a little bit more with each transition and the price to the consumer to get 
everything they want keeps going up. Eventually, aggregators that can offer some form of a la carte licensing are going 
to spring into existence to meet that demand, but for now, the content providers aren’t ready because they haven’t lost 
enough customers to this frustration yet.

> If linear TV is going to enter the new economy (especially to hit the kids), current VoD services are going to have 
> to figure out how to aggregate. And if they don't, we all know who the one left standing is more likely to be :-).

Not so sure about that. More and more people I talk to are finding less and less interesting on Netflix. Producing 
their own content has been Netflix’s response, but eventually, that model just turns them into yet another 
single-studio outlet.

If I had to wager on the last man standing in that arena, I think I’d say Disney to win, NBC/Universal to Place and 
tough to say who picks up the Show position. (If you don’t understand the Win/Place/Show reference, look up “betting on 
a horse race”).

> So let's keep watching this "linear TV for sports" thing develop. I hope to provide better insight in about a year 
> :-).

You enjoy. I have no actual interest in linear TV for sports and amusingly, the linear programming that I do watch is 
recorded by my TiVO and time shifted so I can skip the stupid commercials.

The only time I watch ads is when they’re more interesting than the superbowl, which is pretty much every superbowl.

Owen
> > Remember, this discussion started with a question about live-streaming church
> > services.
> >
> > In the “new normal” of a COVID lockdown world, with the huge increase in
> > teleconferencing, etc. there may well be additional audiences for many-to-many
> > multicast that aren’t currently implemented.
> >
> > IMO, the only sane way to do this also helps solve the v4/v6 conferencing question.
> >
> > Local Aggregation Points (LAPs) are anycast customer terminations. Backbone between
> > LAPs supports IPv6-only and IPv6 multicast (intra-domain only). LAPs are not sharing
> > routing table space with backbone routers. Likely some tunnel mechanism is used to
> > link LAPs to each other to shield backbone routers from multicast state information.
> >
> > Each “session” (whether an individual chat, group chat, etc.) gets a unique IPv6
> > multicast group. Each LAP with at least one user logged into a given session will
> > join that multicast group across the backbone. Users connects to LAPs via unicast.
> > If voice, video, slide, chat streams need to be separated, use different port numbers
> > to do that.
>
> Perhaps I'm biased, but while there might be a model, I don't think Multicast is the tool to drive it.
>
> Mark.