Will Video kill the Internet?
Phil Sim over at Squash has written a post “Will Video kill the Internet?”. His story is one of going from a 3Gig cap to a 25gig and now to a 60gig cap. His assessment is that “for once, bandwidth advances have not kept pace with content production.”
Yes! This is close to the debate about VOD killing the video store which is one I have regularly. Here are some quick calculations on the bandwidth needed to meet your typical rental demand on a Saturday night.
| · | Your average video store on a Saturday will rent 300 DVDs to be watched overnight. |
| · | Australia has about 1300 video stores that will deliver 390,000 DVDs for overnight viewing. |
| · | Compressed for streaming, 4 gig down to 1gig, 390,000 DVDs = 390,000 Gig streamed over say, 5 hours = 78,000 Gig/hour. |
| · | Youtube pushes out globally about 25 Petabytes per month which is about 35,000 Gig/hour, so Australia’s sat night usage to replace the DVD will be *double* Youtube’s global capacity. |
That’s a lot of capacity! Lets not forget Australia is little .. blow that calculation out on a global scale, add in the capacity demands of Blu-ray style high-def and yep, Video will kill the Internet. Luckily, we’re not going to hit that demand now, the local video store will be with us for a long time to come, and in the meantime, infrastructure upgrades will ensure the threat of internet gridlock will be averted.
(nb. the youtube calc of 25 Petabytes bandwidth per month is now 2 years old .. it’s no doubt higher now)