Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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When I first saw the title, the lie that lept to mind was: "People want to stream." They don't. Streaming sucks and is a hack around content producers pathological belief that streams are somehow safer than normal downloads because they can't be captured. Or something. (It doesn't make any sense when you get down to it.)

They do in some cases want their video "now" (not in all cases), but they'd be just as happy if the "stream" stuck around in some form for a while rather than evaporating immediately.

Of course, I read the article, and at first it seems I was wrong. But... if you dig deeper, there's still an interesting aspect to my initial reaction. Delivering live streams to 10,000 users? Yeah, you're in for a world of hurt. But one hour of 1mbps video as a simple file is ~450 megabytes of data, and delivering that to 10,000 people an hour average is more feasible; there's more tricks you can play if you're just distributing a file and not a stream, not the least of which is torrenting. Some people might not get it in an hour, but it's a lesser problem to come close to an hour download time than to get everything necessary for the stream to work.

If you're not trying to stream, the problem is significantly reduced back to something manageable.

Whether this actually helps, I don't know exactly. But I certainly don't think it's as dire.

Interestingly, I observe that the big video sites seem to not stream anymore, they all let loading run ahead if possible. Maybe this is the reason?

Even conceding all of Cuban's points, this is really only relevant for events people want to watch live. Meaning sports and some news, mostly. Concerts, maybe, but what's the market for watching a live concert without being there? Even bands like the Stones, I think, don't do live broadcasts of their shows, do they?

But in any case, all of the fiction shows on television, and even news commentary (e.g. the Daily Show), work fine on the download model. And that is exactly what's happening, $1.99 from iTunes or free with commercials from the network's web site or Hulu the next day, in HD (don't think it's 1080p, but looks pretty good on my monitor).

So, again, even if Cuban is right about everything he says, it demonstrates a much diminished role for cable TV going forwarded, limited mostly to live events.

Speaking for myself, I am completely uninterested in a live stream of a concert at our current tech level, because the compromises to the audio and video to successfully stream are at their worst for a concert. Give me a real, DVD-quality MP4 (clocks in at around 1-2GB) after the event, thanks.

Here's an idea if you want to do almost streaming and run into the problems that the article adresses.

Use a modified version of bittorrent and delay the stream for one or two minutes. That should be enough to distribute the torrent chunks to all viewers. You could make it as an add-on to media players or as a stand-alone product depending on your income model.

Ta-da: problem solved :-)

Disclaimer: I don't know enough about torrents or streaming technology to assess whether this would actually work, but I don't see any conceptual barriers. Feel free to correct me...

Bittorrent isn't sequential, so it'd be tough to say with any certainty that you have established a buffer. I'm not sure if this is something that's recently changed or not though, I'm no expert either.

Bittorrent isn't sequential by design, but you can tweak a torrent client to ask for pieces in order (e.g., Pando, using a bittorrent-like protocol, can do this) -- though if you have a moving target in terms of the set of blocks you are interested in things a get a little more complicated -- a streaming-specific p2p protocol would likely perform better (see comments on this thread for examples).

Streaming can be useful if:

1. You just want to have a preview 2. You have a fast connection and you don't want to wait for the download / you just want to watch it once 3. You just want to click and watch

BitGravity has an API they call Advanced Progressive that allows progressive download with stream-like seeking.

p2p bit torrent streaming (built into browsers) would solve this. Hopefully this technology becomes more mainstream and then Cuban's point would be less valid!

I saw this one p2p streaming client on TC called rayv

"People want to stream." They don't.

Huh?

http://widgets.alexa.com/traffic/graph/?r=1m&y=r&z=1...

^ (youtube vs. piratebay vs. isohunt) have no idea how to save links in alexa, so that will probably disappear.

Per my last parenthetical comment, youtube doesn't actually "stream", and it's also fairly easy to download youtube videos directly, last I knew. Interesting tidbit, no?

But my point isn't that people aren't flocking to "streaming" sites. It's that if you gave them the choice between a forced stream, like the way Netflix streams movies, or a file that downloaded as quickly as possible, persisted, and could be viewed as it came in if your connection is good enough, they'll take the second one every time. The only way "streaming" wins is when it has something that isn't available that second way. (Or people don't realize it's available, or, gasp, don't actually want to break the law to get it.)

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