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Indeed, I've already written a couple of columns on this topic but now it's time to consider things from a slightly different angle...

It seems like only a matter of time before the Net begins to rival broadcast as a vehicle for delivering multi-media content and that could pose big problems for we folks on the backside of the planet.

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You see, while regular broadcasting is a "one to many" design -- whereby a single programme can be delivered to an almost unlimited number of recipients using a fixed amount of bandwidth, IP-based video on demand is a "one to one" design that requires bandwidth to be allocated for each individual viewer.

So, if you're running a small TV station, you notice no change to your power bill as the number of people tuning in increases. Run an IP-based video on demand service however and each new viewer will represent an additional cost.

So what happens here in NZ when Kiwis decide they want to download video content that's being served up from the USA?

Well, depending on the bitrate of that content, your ISP's bandwidth (and ultimately the nation's bandwidth) could get saturated pretty damned quickly.

If 1,000 people decide to watch an episode of "Lost" at the same time, current systems are so stupid that you'd probably end up with 1,000 separate downloads going on with gigabytes of duplicate data being sucked through the same set of pipes.

So maybe we could cache this stuff locally, as some ISPs do with webpages?

Well what works for webpages may not work for video -- for a number of reasons.

Firstly, some streaming protocols are not particularly cacheable, certainly not by regular dumb caches. This is because the media-server dishing them out uses a different protocol to regular HTTP, requiring a complex stream of requests and acknowledgments to be sent and received, and let's not forget that there'll be a complex layer of DRM sitting in there somewhere. Then there's the vexing issue of copyright.

I strongly doubt that any video content producer will be happy with thousands of copies (even DRM'd copies) of their intellectual property being held on a vast array of unknown servers around the globe.

So the alternative might be for such content publishers to issue caching licenses to various ISPs -- but that'll only be practical for the very large content producers and similarly large ISPs. What about all the little guys at both ends of the chain -- they'll still account for a snot-load of duplicated content.

Of course a good DRM system might solve quite a bit of this woe by allowing DRM'd media files to be cached freely but requiring each viewing session to establish a DRM channel with the original server. Without the establishment of such a session (and perhaps some kind of payment to do so), the files would be useless to anyone.

However it's done, the burden of handling all this bulky and complex video content is going to fall squarely on the shoulders of ISPs and major backbone providers. If it's hard or expensive to implement then the long reneged promise of "cheaper, faster internet" could be even less likely.

No ISP can afford to start caching huge amounts of content or pay for the massive levels of bandwidth that video over IP will demand, without passing that cost onto its customers.

I strongly suspect that the way we'll do it here in NZ is to simply keep the bandwidth constricted, maintain quite severe caps on individual user accounts and just put up with the fact that IP video is (at least for the near future) largely "an overseas thing" :-(

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