If You Webcast It, How Many Will Come?

In StreamingMedia.com's latest news feature, Geoff Daily writes about traffic planning for webcasts and mentions among other things that content owners should look to CDNs for help on how to plan for audience levels.

I quote:

CDNs are also often a good reference point for learning more about webcasting in general and, not surprisingly, gaining a better understanding of how much streaming delivery will cost for a particular event. “We’ve built a lot of tools that help us to represent the cost to customers with the least amount of error so their expectations are set correctly,” says VitalStream’s Byrne. “We want them to understand the process.”

Many CDNs also have mechanisms in place, such as alerts on bandwidth charges that can help to limit a Webcaster’s exposure to unexpected spikes in traffic. Some CDNs even have ways to set bandwidth thresholds that, once passed, automatically trigger a change in the way their Webcasts are delivered. “If someone has a fixed budget,” Wheaton says, “we can set it up so that once traffic hits a certain level we can take the 300Kbps stream off of the site and offer only a lower-quality one.”

However, none of this is really ideal is it? Many content owners need to monetize the content based on how many impressions the ads surrounding the content makes, and then providing a lower quality of service and/or limiting audience size does hardly seem beneficial.

Had these content owners deployed P2P technologies as enhancement to their unicasting, they could have offered scalability of their broadcasts and would not have had to worry so much about peak traffic or over-runs in bandwidth.

Read the full feature article by Geoff Daily here.

BBC to launch peer based personalised radio

04 Jul 06

Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson announced the launch of a personalised radio service using peer-to-peer technology at The Guardian Media Group Lecture at the RadioAcademy in Cambridge (3-5 July).

From BBC News:

BBC to offer 'personalised' radio

The BBC wants to allow audiences to create personal radio stations from its content, its director general has said.

The planned service, provisionally called MyBBCRadio, was revealed by Mark Thompson at the Radio Festival in Cambridge.

It aims to give audiences more control by combining existing services such as podcasts and the BBC Radio Player.

It will be part of the BBC's iPlayer, a free service which will also offer seven days of BBC TV on demand.

Thompson said MyBBCRadio would use peer-to-peer technology to provide "thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by audiences themselves".

The BBC hoped to share these ideas with the commercial sector, he added.

Online success

The personalised radio scheme is expected to build on the success of the BBC's online radio services.

In March, the corporation said people had listened to 20 million hours of BBC content online, using everything from live streams to downloaded programmes.

The most requested shows include BBC Radio 4's long-running soap opera The Archers, and Chris Moyles' BBC Radio 1 breakfast show.

In May, audiences downloaded 4.5 million BBC podcasts.

In his speech, Mr Thompson said the corporations' governors would decide on whether podcasting would become a permanent service later this year.

The decision will be based, in part, on a study of how the BBC's podcasts affect the commercial sector.

The governors will also look into the market impact of Radios 1 and 2 following criticism from commercial competitors, said Thompson.

However, he defended the stations, saying they had been successful "not because they've become more like their competitors but because they've become less like them".

"If you've got a problem with a popular BBC, the people you're picking a fight with are the British public," he added.

More information:

radioacademy.org
bbc.co.uk

BBC to stream live matches from Wimbledon

02 June 06

The media magazine NMA reported today that The BBC is to stream live matches from this year's Wimbledon Tennis Championship via BBC Sport's tournament site. This confirms RawFlow’s emphasis on the growing importance of live streaming for broadcasters. “When large broadcasters such as the BBC puts premium content live, others will follow” says RawFlow CEO Mikkel Dissing.

UK visitors will have free access to five courts at the All England Club, while three-minute highlights packages will be available to worldwide users.Content will include coverage from the BBC's terrestrial broadcasts, as well as its red-button feeds.

"The live streaming coverage will make one of the biggest sporting events in the world available to broadband users in the UK, whether they are at home or in the office so they never have to miss a game" says Barbara Slater, head of general sports at the BBC to the NMA.

Internet as infrastructure for TV broadcasts

P2P streaming technologies can help broadcasters and content providers overcome the hitches of live streaming.

After Disney announced last week that they are launching a special web portal, SOAPNETIC, a dedicated web-TV channel for broadcasting their most popular TV shows such as Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief and Lost, journalists and bloggers alike have been questioning whether it is even possible to do this kind of broadcasting online. However, online content delivery could be made possible with a little help from peer streaming technologies.

Technology has always been a vital part of broadcasting and this is even more so today as the digital revolution is driving a convergence of all media; TV, radio and newspapers alike. Digitization allows many kinds of content to be delivered over different networks, and the Internet has become a global infrastructure for communication, opening up myriad possibilities for new industries and services. Convergence between devices picks up speed as technology gaps between TV and PC diminishes: “Finally it seems PCs and TVs will talk the same digital language making it significantly easier to download digital video content over the internet to a PC and then play it back on the TV” (Paul Taylor for FT.com 11/04/06).

With an increasing percentage of the population viewing and listening to rich media distributed via the Internet, broadcasters are expected by the public to provide the same (or better!) service online as offline (i.e. TV and Radio), but the reality is that online activities has been considered as a side-track or something “additional”, and it has not been the focus of the broadcasters attention. However, this is about to change as important players see opportunities for using internet as a content delivery platform. Advertisers for example find themselves threatened by inventions such as TIVO which allows you to record and play content commercial-free, thus the classic model with set times of broadcasting interrupted by 30 seconds of commercials does not seem to be able to survive. The internet on the other hand is perfectly designed for commercials, and can actually enable a real time purchase by simply clicking on the ad.

Broadcasters also see an opportunity to get a larger share of the advertising income by distributing the content themselves over the internet rather than simply licensing the content to cable and satellite providers. Thus, in an attempt to “bake their cake and eat it too”, the world’s top national and commercial broadcasters now announce new Internet based services nearly on a daily basis. Their strategy is monetizing their content, whilst building loyal online communities in order to compete with established user driven content communities, such as myspace.com, and peer based networks where consumers illegally share the latest films, music and TV shows (Limewire, Bittorrent, Kazaa etc). An example of this is the Disney-ABC Television Group April announcement of a launch of a special web portal, SOAPNETIC, dedicated to broadcasting their most popular TV shows such as Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief and Lost online. However, sceptics warn broadcasters against this move towards online streaming. For example Financial times journalist Richard Waters wrote that “the design of the internet is unsuited to the sort of “live” online television services announced by Walt Disney” (FT, 11/04/06).

The sceptics may be right in some respects, but it is not “the design of internet” in itself that is the root of the problem. The internet has actually proven itself as a viable content delivery infrastructure (just look at Itunes!), but indeed, there are two issues at hand here: First of all, broadband penetration in the internet population is too low: According to statistics published by the OECD in late 2005, there are 158 million broadband subscribers worldwide, and the three of the four countries with the highest penetration rates are Iceland, Korea, the Netherlands and Denmark which all have more than 25 subscribers per 100 inhabitants. The United States is the country with most subscribers at 49 million, which accounts for 31% of the broadband population worldwide. This may seem impressive, but considering that broadband can be anything from a 512 kbps connection up to more than 26 mbps, the actual available bandwidth is not optimal. This needs to be addressed by governments and ISPs globally. Interestingly, if the Disney offering gets a large enough audience that could actually be the push needed force the ISP industry to invest in a new infrastructure that is capable of supporting a large mass market online video streaming

Second of all, the current infrastructure of online broadcasting is not built to handle this new digital demand. One of the main problems of streaming live content over the internet is expanding reach whilst achieving economies of scale advantages, and the cost of increased capacity is high. As the size of the audience participating in a live Internet broadcast increases, the bandwidth required for that broadcast increases proportionally. Until now there have been two ways to manage this cost; limitation of audience size or reduction of quality. However, P2P (“peer-to-peer”) enabled streaming may be the solution to a large portion of the problems associated with online broadcasting.

A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers. In practice, many of the files shared on peer-to-peer networks are copies of copyrighted popular music and movies. Thus, some media companies conclude that the networks themselves pose grave threats to the established distribution model. This is now changing, and P2P streaming has become an important issue on broadcasters’ agenda. Even big national broadcasters such as the BBC are currently testing different solutions for using peering technologies in their streaming. When using this technology, the bandwidth requirement of the broadcast is intelligently distributed over the entire network of participants, instead of being centralised at the broadcasts origin: As the audience grows so do the network resources available to distribute that broadcast without adding any additional bandwidth costs. This makes broadcasting over the Internet completely scalable and eliminates the success penalty broadcasters normally experience. RawFlow Inc. is one of the leading suppliers of P2P software solutions today.

Peer enabled streaming helps broadcasters get around bottlenecks and minimizes bandwidth costs, but at the same time it is relying heavily on the upload capacity in the network, and therefore there is a limit on the quality of the stream. Thus, it is not yet possible to stream full-quality movies live. However, we can expect that the high-speed internet penetration in the population will increase dramatically within a short timeframe, as demonstrated by a recent offer in the UK of “free” broadband packages from vendor Carphone Warehouse certainly got the public’s attention as 25,000 people were reported to have signed up just days after its launch (information from Reuters.co.uk). Combined with increased bandwidth, it seems likely that peer enabled streaming technologies is more than a “quick-fix” and can overcome the hitches of live streaming. This has potential to turn the whole broadcasting industry up-side down, and drive content providers who cannot keep up out of business.

Further info:
Mail author