From: "Geo." 

"John Beamish"  wrote in message
news:op.tmfb1agcm6tn4t{at}dellblack.wlfdle.phub.net.cable.rogers.com...

> Cringely says it's Google.  Not yet ... but soon.

He's only partly figured it out. Google isn't stupid enough to believe that
they can compete with cable/satellite/broadcast methods even with all the
bandwidth on the planet.

The only model that will work is different from on demand television
broadcasts from local data centers which is what he is describing. For lack
of a name lets call it GooVO, it's basically the next logical extension to
TIVO. Instead of telling TIVO to record something you simply pick what you
want to watch from a menu and it gets downloaded over some period of time
(longer than it takes to view) and once downloaded you watch it when you
want.

Before you jump on me claiming that it's not immediate enough, realize that
people now wait a week for next weeks episode. It's really no different
than that.

The draw is it lets you watch a series in order, even if you missed the
first several years worth, the workable part is that it lets the usage
levels even out so that idle time (like 3am) can be used as well as prime
time for the downloading process.

Live broadcasts like the news would still (I assume) need to be viewed live
but all the other shows would fall into the GooVO model.

I know how much bandwidth the GooVO model would use, because I've been
doing exactly that for over a year now, no broadcast TV here, we download
everything we want to view. I suck up 20KB-100KB on average all the time.
It could work. It could work a whole lot better if it used P2P networking
based on location (number of hops) but I don't think Google is thinking
along those lines. The reason I say P2P would work better, imagine you live
in a large apartment building, surely someone in that building has already
downloaded one of the shows you want to see so that would come across a
local network much faster than from a google download center (assuming this
became really popular).

It's why I always argue with people who say file share networks use too
much bandwidth to work in a model like this, if they were more popular
there would be less long distance sucking going on because there would be a
greater likelyhood that the content was available someplace closer. Perhaps
if one of the big cable ISP's would pull their heads out of their ass and
realize that promoting P2P would ultimately reduce the need for outside
bandwidth..

Anyway, I've wandered far enough.

Geo.

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