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Feb 11
2006

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Streaming vs. File Sharing

There's a thought-provoking posting by Andrew Odylzko over on Dave Farber's IP list entitled Is Apple Creating the FCC's Worst Nightmare?. There's nothing profoundly new here, but Andrew puts the pieces together in a compelling way. In the posting, Andrew argues that the hopes of the media industry and telcos that streaming media will displace file sharing are contradicted by long term technology trends. File sharing is already dominant -- with the iPod nailing down the trend that Napster started -- and in video, that time is not far off. Odlyzko's key point is what this does to bandwidth demands, especially in light of the telcos' failure to deliver true broadband in the U.S.

...do you want to wait 2 hours for that movie to download to your Video iPod? If you want it there, to take along on the plane ride or to the beach, in 5 minutes, you have got to have a transmission link that is 24 times faster than what is required for real-time streaming.... faster-than-real-time transfers already dominate. Here in the U.S., we have mostly MP3 music files, which are encoded at 100-200 Kbps, and are flying around at 0.5 - 3 Mbps. In places like Korea, network traffic is dominated by movies, which are encoded at typically under 1 Mbps, but are moving across the network at 5-10 Mbps.
Odlyzko also argues that the idea that content revenues will replace connectivity revenues for carriers is a myth. Not only have consumers historically valued connectivity more than content, the content providers themselves want that revenue, and aren't eager to turn it over to the carriers.

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