Cuban on Streaming HD: It Won't Work

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.