Supply and Demand – Video content on the web
With the recent events of the Euro Soccer Championship, the “Tour de France” coming up and after that the Olympics, a lot of discussions (or here) are taking place in the Netherlands about online video distribution. The most recent discussion included KPN (the provider I am using) limiting the amount of “streams” that could be consumed by the users in it’s network. At home I am using a ADSL connection which has been sliced (probably 1/25 but could also be 1/60); normally this would be fine, but for the future, this could be troublesome.
The amount of content each individual user can (or wants) to consume will increase in the (near) future. In the past, the web consisted of text and images; in the past years, YouTube and other video sharing sides have exploded and publishing video on the web hasn’t been as easy as it is now (and will even be easier in future). The demand for higher quality adds a new dimension to the amount of data to be consumed. “High Definition” is the keyword you can find in every TV / Camera store and “High Definition” is what consumers want to see.
Currently the OnDemand and Live streams on the web are seldom in true HD, but this will change very rapidly. How are the IP networks of providers going to react? I think limiting access (either through bandwidth caps or limited amount of connections) is a bad thing.
An alternative way of distribution would be to use the “peer to peer” model. Joost is currently using. But Joost is also running into discussions with various providers; The “Asymmetric” approach limits bandwidth of the upstream connection. There are cases where providers block or throttle these kind of connections.
In the discussion around the various articles IPv6 Multicast and DVB-T are mentioned as alternatives to video distribution on the web. I think video on the web can add much more iinteractivity, for example in Flash you can add overlays, interact with other content and make video truely interactive. This is really the power of video combined with the power of the web.
In my opinion the demand of video (numbers of video and bitrate of video) on the web will hugely increase. Providers really need to catch up here and think of new ideas to bridge this gap.
P.S. This discussion is not only taking place in the Netherlands. The BBC is working on it’s OnDemand player (the iPlayer) and the amount of traffic is also causing discussions (article with statistics) in the UK.
