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Entertainment -- New Bandwidth On Demand Priorities

Written by: Andy Marken

Article Overview: The Olympics showed that the Internet can stand up under the most brutal attack of information hungry people around the globe. What can it mean for your business?

Entertainment -- New Bandwidth On Demand Priorities

Internet Weather – Believe it or not the Internet has its own weather system. Just use your search engine and check the Internet weather. The 2008 Olympics put the environment to a real test but hell didn’t freeze over. Source – Warner Bros

“I think we are on the verge of a major climate shift!” – Jack Hall, The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Bet you missed the big news of the Beijing Olympics.

It was that…nothing happened.

The huge crush of video didn’t bring the Internet down.

The estimated 194 million US and 1.3 billion worldwide Internet users were more than four times the number who were online a decade ago when Mark Cuban’s broadcast.com tried to air the Victoria’s Secret show online.


Figure 1 - Going Online – More than 40 million users in North America and 60 million more worldwide accessed Web sites at home and at the office to keep track of the contests that took place Aug 8 – 24 in Beijing. People in more than 77 countries watched their stars and favorites do their best to win medals for their supporters. Source -- eMarketer

The Games Begin
This online video challenge streamed more than 2200 hours of live competition in 25 sports around the globe.


Content In Flight – The broadcast and internet crews overdesigned the infrastructure of the sites and distribution of the Beijing Olympics events so that it could stand up under all of the attention and scrutiny. The pipes and servers were ready to deliver the personal and team contests completely and on a moment’s notice anywhere in the world.

More than 112 video streams were often available at one time.

Ultimately 336 streams were being sent out simultaneously.

The content was available to 77 countries.

The great thing was online viewers around the globe didn’t have to watch NBC’s version of the Olympics.

Use your search engine, type in Beijing (or 2008) Olympics + country name and BAM!!! you could see the events from your favorite country’s perspective.

Of course the Olympics gave the CWA (Communications Workers of America) the ideal platform to promote the fact that when it comes to real-time download capacity to the home (the last mile), the U.S. sucked !

They just found out that the U.S. is 15th in broadband to the home.


Figure 2 - Poor Finish – While the US started the Internet race more than 30 years ago they’ve faded behind a lot of today’s broadband capable countries. Today it ranks 15th in the Internet/Web marathon. Source -- ComSource

South Korea has been the gold standard for service for years. Four European Union (EU) countries have been deploying fiber faster than the US. Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands added more than 30 percent last year.

They like that capacity so much they’re increasingly watching TV shows (and other entertainment) online.


Figure 3 - Viewership Grows – Gen X and Gen Y men and women are more accustomed to obtaining their news and information online than from print. They are also the audience that will gain more of their entertainment online rather than from TV. Rather than reducing television viewing though the growth of online viewing seems to be added show exposure. Source -- ComSource

Even the UK, Belgium, Luxembourg and France added more lines than the US.

As “bad” as the US Internet infrastructure is, it hasn’t stopped folks from going online and watching content.


Figure 4 - Short vs Long – Online video viewing seems to be kept to short content rather than movies or multiple TV shows. For PC viewing it appears to be a much different form of “channel surfing.” Source – Parks Assoc

Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute!

TV shows are going HighDef and online which requires 7x more bandwidth than SD.

Content Prevails
Researchers at Current Analysis estimate that by 2010 more than 80 percent of the Internet traffic (up from today’s 30 percent) will be video.

First it was what Chris Anderson dubbed long tail stuff content that is interesting, informative to us and maybe two, 2,000 or 200,000 folks on the globe.

Watching the Olympics when it was convenient to you exposed millions to the benefits of anytime entertainment.

Information and entertainment when it is convenient appeals to people.


Figure 5 - All About Choice – People who have found that there is a rich treasure trove of content available on the Web want it all -- TV, movies, trailers, news and sports. Source – Harris Interactive

The huge demands of broadband have content providers pleading for “network neutrality” which is right up there with “digital rights”…an idea with a lot of interpretations.

Depending on where you sit at the table, it is either the ability of your service provider to “manage” what levels of service/sites you use or maintaining the openness supervised by the government.

The problem is these people all think of the Internet the last mile or the last 100 or 10 feet.

It’s not true !!

It’s a network of networks -- not just in the US or EU or China or …

It’s a physical infrastructure that is …everywhere.


Figure 6 - Mesh Network – The strength of the Internet is that it is a network of networks delivering the ability for almost instant access to news, information and content across the country and across the ocean. Big pipes at home are important but server support and popularity of sites determine the quality of your video content. Source – AT&T

Heck, if you’re the only one on line to a Web server you could get great download delivery with dial-up (28.8Kbps).

Add 1,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 people and things choke.

It’s really the speed at the other end.

Front End
And the folks who built out the front end of the 2008 Olympics service did it right!

Check the list of supporting players.

They were the who’s who of the industry plus a lot of up and comers.

China’s government dropped a big chunk of Yuan on the project.

They also did something else you probably didn’t notice.

They invested more Yuan (other countries added currency) to string more high speed fiber optic cable under the Pacific to North America…still the biggest dog on the technology pack.

The investment paid off.

People around the globe shared the pain and glory of their countrymen/women.

China and the Olympic committee were happy with the results.


Happy Results – Perhaps China’s Panda bears seem to be perpetually happy and satisfied but the successful 2008 Olympics in Beijing didn’t give them any reason to be nervous. Everything went almost flawlessly

Today, there are a lot of cables on the oceans’ floor connecting continents and countries.

Most were laid around 2001 when MBAs were starting companies to take advantage of the overwhelming demand for Internet traffic.

They (and their VCs) had visions of winning the gold.

Traffic demands arrived too late for investors in firms like Global Crossing and MCI.

Cisco and industry analysts project that traffic will continue to grow 50-60 percent per year for at least the next five years.

YouTube already sucks up more bandwidth than those of us online in 2000 used…as a group!

There’s still a lot of dark fiber lying on the ocean floor waiting to be lit.

But all of the major players are partners in consortia that are investing billions to add more cable and meshed systems.

It’s called redundancy.

In addition, new technology for handling the onslaught of traffic is rapidly expanding and folks are learning how to handle the data packets with intelligence rather than brute force.

But the Internet, Web 2.0 isn’t about entertainment.

Lou Gerstner, former head of IBM, said it best years ago…“The Internet is about competition, growth and reaching out to customers.”

Global Benefits
Entertainment providers and viewers have reaped the benefits.

But the Internet infrastructure isn’t free!

Government intervention in the Internet is just wrong.

It goes against the competitive supply/demand equation that helped the Internet grow so quickly and robustly.

But we’ve reached a point where online rights come at a cost.

Tiered service sucks?

Higher monthly service charges suck?

Most equitable solution is charge the content aggregators. They’re going to get paid ad dollars for the privilege of reaching folks anyway so let them pay for their bandwidth.

Let them pay to play...you can focus on your movie.

Of course they’ll repeat Vice President Decker statement, “Dr. Hall, our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment. Perhaps you should keep that in mind before making sensationalist claims.”

We’ll have to respond as Terry Rapson did…“Save as many as you can.”

charts, illustrations available by contacting andy@markencom.com

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Article Tags: 2008 olympics, 60 million, beijing olympics, bet, climate shift, day after tomorrow, figure 1, internet weather, mark cuban, medals, oly, olympics, scrutiny, search engine type, verge, video challenge, video streams, warner bros, weather system, worldwide internet users



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