
The Great Internet Video Lie - astrec
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/
======
jerf
When I first saw the title, the lie that lept to mind was: "People want to
stream." They don't. Streaming sucks and is a hack around content producers
pathological belief that streams are somehow safer than normal downloads
because they can't be captured. Or something. (It doesn't make any sense when
you get down to it.)

They do in some cases want their video "now" (not in all cases), but they'd be
just as happy if the "stream" stuck around in some form for a while rather
than evaporating immediately.

Of course, I read the article, and at first it seems I was wrong. But... if
you dig deeper, there's still an interesting aspect to my initial reaction.
Delivering live streams to 10,000 users? Yeah, you're in for a world of hurt.
But one hour of 1mbps video as a simple file is ~450 megabytes of data, and
delivering that to 10,000 people an hour average is more feasible; there's
more tricks you can play if you're just distributing a file and not a _stream_
, not the least of which is torrenting. Some people might not get it in an
hour, but it's a lesser problem to come close to an hour download time than to
get everything necessary for the stream to work.

If you're not trying to _stream_ , the problem is significantly reduced back
to something manageable.

Whether this actually helps, I don't know exactly. But I certainly don't think
it's as dire.

Interestingly, I observe that the big video sites seem to not stream anymore,
they all let loading run ahead if possible. Maybe this is the reason?

~~~
jimbokun
Even conceding all of Cuban's points, this is really only relevant for events
people want to watch live. Meaning sports and some news, mostly. Concerts,
maybe, but what's the market for watching a live concert without being there?
Even bands like the Stones, I think, don't do live broadcasts of their shows,
do they?

But in any case, all of the fiction shows on television, and even news
commentary (e.g. the Daily Show), work fine on the download model. And that is
exactly what's happening, $1.99 from iTunes or free with commercials from the
network's web site or Hulu the next day, in HD (don't think it's 1080p, but
looks pretty good on my monitor).

So, again, even if Cuban is right about everything he says, it demonstrates a
much diminished role for cable TV going forwarded, limited mostly to live
events.

~~~
jerf
Speaking for myself, I am _completely_ uninterested in a live stream of a
concert at our current tech level, because the compromises to the audio and
video to successfully stream are at their worst for a concert. Give me a real,
DVD-quality MP4 (clocks in at around 1-2GB) after the event, thanks.

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iamelgringo
Mark forgot to mention a "Full disclosure" he founded HDnet, which is a HD
television network.

I call FUD. Mark's argument is that point to multi-point streaming of live
video events isn't feasible technologically because of bandwidth limitations.
His argument is a straw man.

There are problems with point to multipoint video streaming. That doesn't kill
internet video. Fewer and fewer people are watching live events as they
happen. Many people want the content, but they want to watch it
asynchronously, not live. People are increasingly recording the shows that
they want to watch on DVR and then watching them whenever they want. Internet
video is all about watching content whenever you want to, not about watching
the content live. That's where Mark is wrong.

Who here watched the inauguration live? I watched it on Hulu 1 hour after it
happened. Much more convenient than trying to remember to hit the DVR record
button.

The boon that YouTube and internet video has been for content creators is that
they can get any distribution at all. Before YouTube and video streaming, if
you had video content and you wanted to distribute it, you could either try to
get a TV station to pick it up, sell it to a movie studio, or market it
directly yourself via direct sales.

It's actually _possible_ now for a content creator to distribute their video
on YouTube and get it seen by one million people. That's the promise of
internet video, not that one million people are going to watch your content
all at once.

And, it's that sort of distribution is making a lot more cottage video
industries possible like Peepcode: <http://peepcode.com/> Where a couple of
guys can make a living selling educational video streamcasts. That would never
have happened 5 years ago.

~~~
wmf
To be fair, Cuban was also involved in broadcast.com and Red Swoosh, so he has
experience with Internet video and traditional TV.

In the comments he says that on-demand streaming with a lot of simultaneous
viewers is just as difficult as live.

~~~
iamelgringo
Yes, on demand streaming is difficult, but it's not "the lie of internet
video".

Perhaps he's aiming his blog post at TV executives. If they believe that they
are going to be able to stream the Superbowl instead of having it on broadcast
TV, then yes, internet streaming is a lie. But there are only a couple of
hundred content producers that would be true for. Think producers and
distributors of hit television shows or event broadcasters.

But, for the vast millions of content video content producers around the world
that now have an audience and distribution, internet streaming is a dream, not
a lie.

------
pj
This may be true from the producer perspective. It's difficult to get your
message to millions of people at one time using the Internet.

From the consumer perspective, however -- the internet is the clear winner, if
you must choose one. There are millions of streams available at any one time.
That's the beauty of it. That's why Internet video will win in the long run or
at least be a viable option for the individual over television. If you are
willing to sacrifice mainstream content, ditch the TV and go all Internet. I
haven't had a TV in over 6 years.

But Mr. Cuban is right, TV will be around for a long time. It will remain the
winner for mainstream content, but the Internet isn't about mainstream content
it's about access to content that isn't popular enough to warrant distributing
to the main streams via traditional wireless routes.

Anyone here also TV free? How many years?

~~~
dasil003
Cuban's point is largely specious--the cost of distribution is high. The
Internet doesn't magically make things cheap. Granted.

However what the Internet does do is level the playing field (at least
compared to traditional media distribution methods). This means that cranky
old white men clutching yesteryear's business models will have their lunch
eaten sooner or later.

Even though scalability is an issue, it hasn't been solved because the demand
hasn't been high enough yet. How many events have to scale that big? In this
case, the long tail of content (meaning anything that needs to scale to more
than a million simultaneous views) is the vast majority of content. Hulu
doesn't have any trouble streaming the most popular television shows. How many
Superbowls and Obama inaugurations actually happen?

Furthermore, the solution for massive scalability already exists. It's called
BitTorrent, and Cuban was remiss in not mentioning it. BitTorrent makes
scalability a function of total Internet bandwidth. It also transfers the
hardware costs to the users (who don't see it as a cost). The bandwidth is
still more expensive than television broadcast, but I imagine reaching
everyone in the US via television is not exactly cheap either.

------
Tichy
Back to p2p networks then, is it?

~~~
utnick
There are a ton of chinese live tv p2p networks ( tvkoo, ppstream, sopcast ),
in theory they could stream the kind of numbers that Cuban is talking about.

~~~
est
Yeah, you are right. I have setup a live broadcast netwowk using TVAnts in my
school's Intranet, about 3k-5k peak users. I think it's easy to expand it to
10k.

Report says <http://news.sohu.com/20070320/n248849308.shtml> in 2007 the peak
viewer of QQLive reaches to 1650k during the Chinese New Year Spring Festival.
I guess this year they may reach a much higher number.

------
wmf
Cuban argues that serving many simultaneous video streams is expensive, but
what's the ratio between simultaneous streams and total viewers?

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froo
.. and yet if you are to believe the NY Times (I also read something from
Google that says the same thing, but was unable to find the link) that TV will
be dwarfed by people using the internet in the not too distant future.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/technology/25drill.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/technology/25drill.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin)

Then again, Nielsen shows that the average American household watches
significantly more TV than uses the internet?

<http://www.nielsen.com/media/2008/pr_081124.html>

I'd say that while this might be currently true - given the shift in eyeballs
from the TV to the Computer Screen amongst the younger people, then costs for
content producers should invariably become lower as time marches on - so
cuban's point is a bit of a moot point.

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jacquesm
the porn industry (notably cam4.com) proves this to be utter bull. The
question is if you can make it pay, sex makes a good bit of money so that's
where you'll see tech that is 'not feasible' years before the mainstream
catches up.

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tjmc
Doesn't Joost address the simultaneous user problem?

------
point
Most people don't have time at the same time and will watch stuff timeshifted
to one another.

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theklub
Hold on. Has he never heard of ustream.tv?

