FW: <nettime> Open Source Streaming Alliance

[Eric Miller <eric@OAKTREE.com>]

hi, 
interesting post.

see, the problem that I see is that bandwidth is not free, nor can it ever
be free, right?  And MP3 streaming chews up bandwidth like there's no
tomorrow...witness the number of college campuses that are banning Napster
traffic.  Personally, even with our T1, we make an effort to restrain
streaming media traffic...'cause with 30 people sharing a line, all it would
take is a few 200Kbps streams to bring our net connection to an unusably
clogged condition.  

Plus the underlying transport technology requires an incredible amount of
implementational sophistication to scale to large audiences effectively.
This is why RBN charges so much, eh?  And it may be an oversimplification to
say that Real uses proprietary technology.  They use the open RTSP standard,
a la Quicktime, and it's an RFC-approved standard.

And MP3 decoding is processor-intensive.  even more so for MPEG-standard
video.  my 450MHz Pentium gags on MPEG.  So the day of Palm OS decodes of
MP3/MPEG is a ways off...even then, seems to me that the current wireless
trends for Palm won't support A/V-capable bandwidth for years.  

So yeah, in a perfect world, we'd be able to scale for free.  but bandwidth
costs money, and there's not much of a benefit in people choking their own
connections for the good of random strangers on the net.

as far as global distribution, in a way, you already can through Shoutcast.
And frankly, if everyone is broadcasting, who's going to listen?  it's hard
enough to sift out the good content from the junk on Shoutcast right now as
it is.  Right now, if you have good content, it rises to the top via
channels hosted by Real, Atom Films, Shoutcast...but generic IP broadcast
doesn't care about quality, it just floods the available bandwidth with
packets.

And it's only going to be worse if people start putting in paranoia-soothing
firewalls that reject UDP streaming traffic.

Anyway, I think it's a great thought, but realistically we just can't
dismiss the infrastructure requirements, and the bandwidth allocation needs
of users and prospective hosts.

Eric "why am I a continual nay-sayer on this list?" Miller

| Eric Miller 
| OakTree.com Web Technology and Development
| 503.517.3800

-----Original Message-----
From: Drazen Pantic [mailto:drazen.pantic@nyu.edu] 
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2000 7:44 AM
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Open Source Streaming Alliance

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