Intercast Blog

Comcast Metered Broadband Official — Beware What You Download

2008-10-23T01:36:00.000-07:00

Source: http://gigaom.com/2008/08/28/comcast-makes-metered-broadband-official-beware-what-you-download/
28 Aug 2008
Short Summary: Karl Bode over on DSL Reports reports that Comcast will institute a 250 GB cap on its broadband connections starting Oct. 1. Expect other carriers to follow suit and make tiered broadband a reality.

Intercast Feedback
1 Sept 2008
Author: Adam Ehrlich, Intercast Networks Marcom
The fact that Comcast is capping bandwidth usage goes to show that the issue of network congestion and scarce bandwidth resources has become an issue on the forefront of the industry. One can assume that this cap proves that the advent of IPTV is upon us - there would be no need to cap if people weren't downloading heavy files to consume from their PC (or game console, media center etc.). In his article Om Malik argues that HD quality video is a major drain upon bandwidth resouces and as consumers increasingly look to consume HD grade videos the issue of network congestion will only become more and more commonplace.
Intercast Networks' video delivery platform provides a perfect solution to all of the issues mentioned in the article as it offers scalable amounts of HD quality video without using up network resouces. This solution becomes more valuable as consumers increasingly download HD grade video thus further straining an already lagging network.

Consumer Demand Driving More than 80% of European Broadcast Organisations to Offer High Definition Video Content Online, Akamai Reveals

2008-10-22T06:03:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2008/press_091208.html
12 Sept 2008
Short Summary:Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced that trend research conducted with attendees of this year's IBC2008 has revealed that 82% of European broadcast organisations have plans to offer High Definition (HD) video content to online audiences in the next 12 months.

Intercast Feedback
15 Sept 2008
Author: Adam Ehrlich, Intercast Networks Marcom
As more and more providers are jumping onto the HD bandwagon, competitors will have no choice but to offer their own HD rollout in order to remain a viable contendor. Akamai's survey is another example of the market's increasing demand for video content with HD quality. As providers look to meet this demand via online video delivery they will increasingly have to contend with issues like network congestion and inefficient bandwidth utilization. Another important finding in the survey shows that trends are moving from IPTV (consumption from the PC) to consumption from a large range of consumer devices like STBs, direct to TV game consoles and more.

Intercast's Multicast-to-Storage based delivery solution provides a video delivery platform that eliminates network congestion and inefficient bandwidth utilization issues. Furthermore, Intercast's flexible solution is fully capable of video delivery to any storage enabled CPE including STBs, game consoles and more.

BT Vision launches High-Definition films with NBC Universal

2008-10-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.btplc.com/news/articles/showarticle.cfm?articleid=%7Bd2589309-e005-4f3c-b357-7b591245a74e%7D
17 Sept 2008
Short Summary: BT Vision has entered an agreement with NBC Universal International Television Distribution for a broad selection of feature films to appear on BT Vision’s new Hi-Def on demand movie service in the UK.

Intercast Feedback:
22 Oct 2008
Author: Adam Ehrlich, Intercast Networks Marcom
This agreement provides an excellent example of increasing market trends for high-quality (Hi-Def) on demand video content. As market demand for this type of service continues to rise, the internet broadband networks via which the videos are delivered, will become even more congested than they already are - as the internet was not built to handle the large scale distribution of bandwidth heavy files.
Intercast Networks' M2S solution is capable of the scalable delivery of high-quality (Hi-Def) video files directly to users' STBs. As the video content is intelligently distributed via Multicast delivery technology, network congestion issues are efficiently solved. Moreover, as videos are consumed from users' storage, there are no download time issues and quality of experience is guaranteed.

Why Are The ISPs Siding With Hollywood Over File Sharing?

2008-10-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/why-are-the-i-s-p-s-siding-with-hollywood-over-file-sharing-
25 Sept 2008
Short Summary: A new lobby called Art + Labs is backed by players you'd expect -- NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America -- but it’s also backed by AT&T, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft.

Intercast Feedback:
19 Oct 2008
Author: Adam Ehrlich, Intercast Networks Marcom
Partnerships between ISPs and Hollywood companies will be ever more commonplace as consumption of video via the internet increases and both parties realize the huge potential for big-time profits. However, profits from Internet TV must not be taken for granted as a variety of scaling and monetization challenges must be first surmounted.
Intercast's solution enables both ISPs and big name content providers to realize profits as it intelligently uses its Multicast-to-Storage technology to deliver scalable amounts of video titles - at a lower delivery cost point.

Google's Vint Cerf, 'Father of the Internet': "Online Video Will Be Distributed in Download Mode"

2008-09-10T00:38:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://www.beet.tv/2008/06/googles-vint-ce.html
24 Jun 2008
Short Summary:
Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is most often called the "father of the Internet," says that the popularity and demand for online video will mean that the distribution will eventually be done "in download mode," not streaming, which is pervasive today.

Intercast Feedback:
24 Jun 2008
Author: Noam Bardin, Intercast Networks CEO
Vint is basically arguing for video being pre-delivered to cheap storage with multicasting as the scalable delivery protocol - a perfect description of our Multicast-to-Storage (M2S) application.

Pando CEO: The 'CDN of the Future' Will Include P2P

2008-08-06T04:07:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=450&doc_id=160788
4 Aug, 2008
Short Summary: Pando Networks Inc. CEO Robert Levitan says the dirty little secret about online video is that "the business model is really bad." He attributes this to today's current delivery model where, he says, "the more video you deliver, the more money you lose."
Intercast Feedback:
6 Aug, 2008
Author: Alon Levitan, Intercast Networks AVP Marketing
We all know why the rise of P2P technologies is stalling. Many of the leading service providers (BBC is a good example) understand that P2P cannot deliver the quality of service levels to provide a continuously good user experience. No larger brand is going to jeopardize its brand equity to be associated with a quality prone product or service.

Being dependant on the amount of users that are concurrently online, that have opted in to seed a specific title (video) and that are not using their already narrow upstream bandwidth for other purposes is simply too much to ask for.

Therefore, and not surprisingly, most of the P2P network providers must revert back to streaming technologies to make up for the lack in P2P delivery efficiency.

Is P2P going to be used in the future to replace a portion of the CDNs delivery over internet? I suppose it depends mainly on the ISPs to embrace this idea. With oversubscription as their main business model and frightening and fast increase in bandwidth consumption P2P only adds to the over-the-top traffic problem that ISPs are trying to cope with.

Network providers and ISPs have other delivery technologies they can choose from. Why not utilize the entire bandwidth spectrum at hand. Off-peak time bandwidth is available in abundance and is just waiting to be tapped into. What if there was a way to shift the majority of bandwidth intense traffic - yes, we are referring to video - to the most economical time window/s on the network. All this underutilized bandwidth would suddenly come in very handy and improve each network's/ISP's overall delivery efficiency and of course bottom line results.

What will it take for the network players to understand that the solution to their problem lies in the activation of IP multicast on their networks? If we then add a personalization component to the equation, which enables to determine each user’s personal preference and then push the content directly to each user’s personal storage via a scheduled delivery process, we suddenly get a very smart, efficient and scalable network that can handle the onslaught of video traffic. Multicast-to-Storage technology delivers on this promise and therefore needs to be considered when looking at the future of content delivery networks.
In the end the future of content delivery will be a mesh up of different technologies each providing a crucial component in the delivery process. The user will not care how he receives his personalized content; he just wants to get it in the best possible quality.

Cuban on Streaming HD: It Won't Work

2008-08-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

Source:http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=430&doc_id=136704
31 July 2008
Short Summary:
In an interview with Light Reading's Next-Gen Video Strategies, Cuban makes many points against streaming high-definition content over the Internet -- most specifically, the engineering.
Intercast Feedback:
3 Aug 2008
Author: Alon Levitan, Intercast Networks AVP Marketing
HD over Internet can work - but delivery needs to change
It is one thing to proclaim that HD over Internet won't work - it's another thing to create the technologies that will make it happen. The main obstacle of making it happen today is the limited bandwidth to support a mass market video service with the adequate quality of service. I'm not even going so far as to look at HD only, although this is definitely a growing consumer demand, but even a standard definition TV service is not feasible with the current unicast (streaming) methodology. Furthermore, if we take a closer look we can see that all networks today are engineered to support peak time demand, and from a business standpoint it really doesn't make sense to over invest in network capacity to be able to support only a small portion of the daily hours. What's with all the unused off peak capacity. There is a real opportunity to monetize all that non-utilized bandwidth. All it requires is a change in the mindset to make it happen.
User today are seeking to express their personality and this is also reflected in their video consumption. The Internet has introduced the means to easily find the content which meets a user's personal taste. As more users jump onto the bandwagon it will become an even greater burden for network providers to cope with the growing bandwidth demand to satisfy their customer's needs. In contrary to Mark Cuban's opinion, the younger generation is transforming their PC into their preferred video playback device. One simply cannot deny that a new generation of consumers is evolving, which is technologically more apt and which is relying on the Internet for most of their social engagements and entertainment requirements.
So how can we support this ever growing demand for more personalized and high quality content via the Internet?
Well, the technologies are already available and only need to be implemented.
A major step would be for network providers to finally realize that they have to move past unicast to make good on the promise to deliver high quality video (content) over their networks. By activating the multicast capabilities, already inherent on large portions of the network, networks providers can expand their service portfolio to introduce a high quality video service capable of supporting HD (and I'm referring to full HD), without heavy CAPEX investments. In addition this video service could be personalized to each users individual taste - now wouldn't that be nice.
Already today more and more users are delighted by the advantages of a PVR-like experience. As a matter of fact, users with a PVR or video-from-storage based consumption preference watch less and less linear TV. Titles are ready and waiting on storage to be viewed anytime the user so decides. Time-shifting is big today and more users are unchaining themselves from EPG slavery.
Still users must browse the EPG to find the titles of interest to them and manually manage their storage capacity. TiVO was the first to introduce a more personalized way of automatically getting content titles matched to your personal preferences. There's a dispute on how much personalization is actually needed to create a satisfactory, user friendly yet simple way for users to get only (or most) of the content they want.
A new technology and actually methodology to enable a video service which is in line with the changing consumer experience is Multicast-to-Storage. User requests for specific titles are aggregated to form content request groups, which are used to create a delivery schedule that covers most of the requested titles. The titles are then pushed directly to the user's device storage (PC, Set top box, Gaming console, you name it) via multicast which replicates the file at the outer most point in the network rather than sending it via individual dedicated streams (unicast) for each of the title requests.
The huge advantage is that users subscribe to the titles they want and then wait for them to arrive. The network providers can now utilize all that unused bandwidth (and there's lots of it) to deliver these titles in best quality. The actual access bandwidth of each user becomes irrelevant in terms of video quality as consumption is from storage without buffering, reduced frame rates and other diminishing factors that reduce the user experience.
So, Streaming HD may not work due to unicast delivery constraints - but this doesn't rule out that today’s networks are capable of providing a personalized HD video service over the Internet.

File-sharers want to have your cake and eat it too

2008-07-07T05:38:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/19/digitalvideo.internet
19 Jun 2008
Short Summary:
Peer-to-peer file sharers think it's perfectly OK to grab three quarters of the communal internet bandwidth. Indeed, some are defiant about it. Their internet service provider has foolishly sold them an "unlimited" connection so they are entitled to download 5GB a day, or more, at any time. The fact that today's internet is incapable of coping with their demands is beside the point: ISPs should simply provide more bandwidth.

Intercast Feedback:
19 Jun 2008
Author: Noam Bardin, Intercast Networks CEO
The need to migrate from the unicast internet to the multicast internet to support the evolution of the web from a communication network to an entertainment network. Another excellent article on the limitations of the unicast internet and a proposal to limit demand for online video delivery technologically (i.e. since it is expensive to deliver what people want, lets limit what they get...). At Intercast Networks, we believe that the source of the problem is the unicast basis of the internet (point-to-point delivery) which is great for communication and lightweight content but not optimal for video and heavy lifting of large files delivered to many users. The next evolution of the internet will have to be the migration from the unicast Internet to a multicast Internet (point-to-multipoint) which can replicate the economic structure of the broadcast world and is the underlying infrastructure of IPTV deployments while still supporting the innovation of the world wide web.

Cisco Visual Networking Index Projects Global IP Traffic to Reach Over Half a Zettabyte(1) in Next Four Years

2008-07-07T05:36:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_061608b.html
16 Jun 2008
Short Summary:
Cisco Systems Inc. is projecting a sixfold jump in Internet traffic between 2007 and 2012, as online video becomes the biggest driver of global data communications. The networking-equipment maker, as part of a study called the Cisco Visual Networking Index, predicts that Internet video - which accounted for 5% of data traffic in 2005 - will represent 30% of total data transfers by the end of this year. That will swell to 50% by 2012, Cisco estimates.

Intercast Feedback:
16 Jun 2008
Author:
Exellent Whitepaper providing in depth details on the growth and usage of IP networking worldwide. Findings show that bandwidth usage will most likely double every two years mostly as a result of video sharing.

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic

2008-07-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/technology/15cable.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin
15 June 2008
Short Summary:
For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country's largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

Intercast Feedback:
15 June 2008
Author: Noam Bardin, Intercast Networks CEO
A good summary of the plans of America's top 3 ISP's (AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast) to limit internet usage in an attempt to curb usage of the heaviest users, but (as Cisco put it): "today's 'bandwidth hog' is tomorrow's average user." What do you do when your average user wants to consume so much bandwidth? Instead of limiting demand, new technology needs to be adopted to enable the throughput of content (primarily video) that consumers want. Multicast-to-Storage can meet this demand without breaking the ISP's bottom line.

AT&T looking at charging heavy Internet users extra

2008-07-07T05:22:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080612/tec_at_t_internet.html
12 Jun 2008
Short Summary:
AT&T Inc., the country's largest Internet provider, is considering charging extra for customers who download large amounts of data. "A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week. The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said.

Intercast Feedback:
15 Jun 2008
Author: Noam Bardin, Intercast Networks CEO
The current unicast technology paradigm creates a strange business situation - consumers want more video content from the internet, content owners are embracing legal delivery to satisfy this demand but ISPs are attempting to throttle, traffic shape, rate limit, meter or "optimize" this usage - basically not providing what consumers want to receive. Multicast-to-Storage (M2S) can lower the delivery cost to the point where all players can enjoy on-line video delivery - consumers, content owners and ISPs.

Could BBC1 streaming kill the Internet in the UK?

2008-07-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3582-could-bbc1-streaming-kill-the-internet-in-the-uk.html
5 Jun 2008
Short Summary:
The rows over how broadband providers will cope with the increasing amount of video traffic we are all consuming continues today with the news that the BBC is to make BBC1 available as a live stream at some point in the next few months. Can multicast be the remedy to cope with the spiraling bandwidth requirements?

Intercast Feedback:
5 Jun 2008
Author: Noam Bardin, Intercast Networks CEO
What is clear from this article is that Multicast needs to be rolled out to the edge for video to scale on the internet. The adoption of multicast on the one hand, and the use of Multicast-to-Storage on the other, will enable the delivery of video without breaking the ISPs business model. The streaming of live TV seems like solving the problem of the past - the early adopters who use their PC for video are part of the digital generation for whom appointment TV and linear TV are irrelevant, just as a young consumer with a cell phone has no need for a land line at home, so does the new TV consumer have no need for linear TV (Sports and news excluded).

Most UK Residents Time-Shift TV Content

2008-07-07T04:33:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://www.marketingvox.com/most-uk-residents-time-shift-tv-content-038925/
2 Jun 2008
Short Summary:
Over half of UK residents (57 percent) watch at least one hour of on-demand TV or recorded TV each week. Of the 57 percent who time-shift content, about one-third watch at least three hours of on-demand TV per week. About half of online UK residents (48 percent) have watched video or TV on the internet, with the vast majority using internet-based TV services for on-demand viewing (70 percent).

Intercast Feedback:
3 Jun 2008
Author: Noam Bardin, Intercast Networks CEO
As the migration from linear, broadcast TV to on-demand TV accelerates, the pressure on the networks will accelerate. Both on the Internet side and the TV side, the number of unicast streams (Internet streaming and VOD/NPVR streaming) will grow substantially, and with them the cost. Operators must adopt a new approach to content delivery to scale the delivery of content while leveraging the proven user experience of the PVR and the dropping cost of storage.

Time Warner tries out metered Internet access

2008-07-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

Source: href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24936796/

Short Summary:
As internet video moves mainstream, ISP's are trying to find ways to deal with the bandwidth costs. Time Warner Cable is attempting to limit usage through pricing. This penalizes users for consuming internet video, imagine a movie download costing $2-4 and then paying $1-2 for the bandwidth... On the flip side, ISP's have no choice but to do something different as the bandwidth costs (with no associated revenue) from internet video skyrocket.

Intercast Feedback:
3 Jun 2008
Author: Noam Bardin, Intercast Networks CEO
By adopting Multicast-to-Storage (M2S) technology, consumers can easily be incentivized to consume video content through M2S enabled services as Multicast does not count against their download caps. In a recent trial conducted by Intercast and several leading universities we proved that our technological approach can scale and that consumers, when operating under download caps such as on university campuses, are aware of the limitations and value the lack of rate limiting M2S provides. ISP's adopting M2S can increase the quantity of content delivered on their networks at a fraction of the cost, providing consumers with a high value and differentiated service.