P2P as solution for file-served television
Here’s a blog entry pointing out that the popularity of YouTube and other forms of videosharing are creating a bandwidth crisis, and that P2P technologies might be the solution:
“Ah, but remember Moore’s Law, which is going to increase our
bandwidth dramatically over time! It doesn’t matter. Throw 250 million
viewers watching 180 channels up on the Net, raise the resolution to
full broadcast then raise it again to HDTV, and even Moore’s Law won’t
catch up. Just carrying all the viewers of “Desperate Housewives” at
the current iTunes resolution won’t be economically viable for another
decade according to Moore’s Law.
“I am no Luddite. IP is the future of global communication on all
levels. But adding video to the mix is so bandwidth intensive that
using current techniques will push back total IP conversion for
decades.
“Still, there is incredible incentive to push this digital conversion
and a heck of a lot of money on the line. So we’ll just have to cheat.
“And that brings me back to the peer-to-peer schemes I discussed a
little last week. By using excess upload capacity of client nodes as
repeaters, putting together 64 gigabits-per-second actually isn’t that
hard. Stealing 256 kilobits per client would require a total of
256,000 participating clients to do the job, which is only 2.5 percent
of the total “Desperate Housewives” viewer population….”
