Live Internet Television

Call me a curmudgeon, but I naturally distrust reports based on research by interested parties.

According to WebTVWire, Cisco’s in-house report indicates that Web video — including Web TV — will dominate the Internet by 2013, making up 2/3 of all traffic. (note my own bold emphasis!):

Cisco, a company that designs and sells networking and communication technology, today released an updated version of its Visual Networking Index. This study looks at how the Internet is likely to grow between now and 2013, and what sectors will be responsible for driving traffic and bandwidth usage.

The research predicts that total IP traffic is set to hit 56 exabytes of data per month by 2013, up from just 9 exabytes of data per month during 2008. This means that annual global IP traffic will exceed two thirds of a zettabyte (1 trillion gigabytes) by that time. Which is going to put a hell of a strain on the system.

I have no doubt that TV is moving onto the Web from many different angles, and that that is a lot of whatever-bytes. But they don’t need to place a strain on networks…innovation is at hand elsewhere than at Cisco to create new, scalable and sophisticated ways of bringing TV onto your computer, without creating broadband network congestion. A solution like ivi TV makes it possible to keep your web-browsing and TV-on-your-PC watching concurrent and equally smooth.

As we’ve said here on the ivi TV blog before, the Web is just not the best platform for TV delivery. And Internet TV doesn’t need to be Browser-based TV. To recap from Todd’s post last week:

Websites simply aren’t good live TV delivery mechanisms.  They’re great for relevant video clip delivery and archived video, as websites are easily organized thematically and are searchable.

Live TV, and alpha-state TV viewing, requires channel changing, and most importantly continuously-streamed content. ivi delivers the living room TV experience in a downloadable, stand-alone player.  Unlike cumbersome “full-screen only” players (…), the ivi player allows multi-tasking, because it can operate in easily customizable window sizes.  Television is coming to every Internet-connected device.

WebTVWire explores the issue of whether or not Netflix, recently doing lots to make the idea of digital downloads and streaming mainstream, is having to throttle its broadband streaming to PCs in order to meet its obligations to XBox 360:

A thought-provoking post on The Break it down Blog investigates whether Netflix has started throttling its service to PC users. The author, Riyad Kalla, has noticed a deterioration of the Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ service on his PC compared to on his Xbox 360.

He details how he determined that it was Netflix rather than his ISP, Qwest, doing the throttling and asks whether this is due to Netflix having contractual obligations to provide a certain level of service to Microsoft via the Xbox 360.

This is the scenario ivi is built to avoid, offering virtually infinite scalability. Yes, these are the issues that make us proud as we go into private beta and beyond!
Whether or not this is happening at Netfilx, the issues are interesting and WebTVWire explores them well.

This is not a post to criticize the NCAA or CBS. We at ivi applaud their attempt to televise every NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament game on the Web.

There is an overwhelming demand for such a service and the NCAA and CBS are right to respond to the public’s interest. The problem is that their technology is failing them.

Flash-based players can only accommodate so much user traffic before there is service degradation. Audio-sync problems, picture-freeze, and continuous buffering are the common symptoms suffered by the online viewer.

The good news is that help is on the way.  ivi TV was specifically designed to provide a consistent, enjoyable Internet television experience.

After all, March Madness should be about the games, not about content delivery.

It’s Saturday, time for some “culcha,” no? I came across this poem and it really resonated with the themes we are immersed in here at ivi.

It’s by Mary Jo Salter, from A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems (Borzoi Reader). I personally like to read rather than listen, but you can listen to the poet reading her poem.

A Phone Call to the Future

1.
Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black-and-white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.

Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you’re not there.
You’ll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there’s only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family’s having dinner.

Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That’s how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.

The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onion skin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who made their dresses for the dance.

2.
This was the Fifties: as far back as I go.
Some of it lasted decades.
That’s why I remember it so clearly.

Also because, as I lie in a motel room
sometime in 2004, scrolling
through seventy-seven channels on my back
(there ought to be more—this is a cheap motel room),
I can revisit evidence, hear it ringing.
My life is movies, and tells itself in phones.

The rotary phone, so dangerously languid
and loud when the invalid must dial the police.
The killer coming up the stairs can hear it.
The detective ducks into a handy phone booth
to call his sidekick. Now at least there’s touch tone.
But wait, the killer’s waiting in the booth
to try to strangle him with the handy cord.
The cordless phone, first noted in the crook
of the neck of the secretary
as she pulls life-saving files.
Files come in drawers, not in the computer.
Then funny computers, big and slow as ovens.
Now the reporter’s running with a cell phone
larger than his head,
if you count the antenna.

They’re Martians, all of these people,
perhaps the strangest being the most recent.
I bought that phone. I thought it was so modern.
Phones shrinking year by year, as stealthily
as children growing.

3.
It’s the end of the world.
Or people are managing, after the conflagration.
After the epidemic. The global thaw.
Everyone’s stunned. Nobody combs his hair.
Or it’s a century later, and although
New York is gone, and love, and everyone
is a robot or a clone, or some combination,

you have to admire the technology of the future.
When you want to call somebody, you just think it.
Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera.
You can scroll through the actual things that happened,
and nobody disagrees. No memory.
No point of view. None of it necessary.

Past the time when the standard thing to say
is that, no matter what, the human endures.
That whatever humans make of themselves
is therefore human.
Past the transitional time
when humanity as we know it was there to say that.
Past the time we meant well but were wrong.
It’s less than that, not anymore a concept.
Past the time when mourning was a concept.

Of course, such a projection,
however much I believe it, is sentimental—
belief being sentimental.
The thought of a woman born
in the fictional Fifties.

That’s what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing’s stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.