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broadband cable services towards IP, often causing capacity issues inside ISP, wireless carrier, and even enterprise networks.
The Problem of Traffic Delivery at Scale
There is tremendous pressure between the ever-accelerating pace of change in how we are using the Internet in our everyday life and our high expectations of internet services (for example the quality of streaming live & on-demand video) and the existing ecosystem with its inherent limitations, variety of players with their own special interests and the drive toward stricter governance of the Internet.
While I believe that the issue of content delivery at scale is a larger problem and needs to be addressed at a fundamental level for the long term, the general issues affecting OTT media streaming are clearly understood by all industry players today.
While the FCC is trying to maintain a balance between the needs and influence of content creators and owners, aggregators, ISPs, entrepre-neurs, etc., most of the talks in the media revolve around the legal aspects of the issue. There are few discussions about the technological aspects of the accelerating revolution and the state of the ecosystem that has to carry all this content at the end of the day.
We can clearly see the different strategies from
several sides of the ecosystem addressing the issue of delivering content at scale: Netflix is shrinking file sizes (re-encoding) to reduce bandwidth consumption. T-Mobile, AT&T, Comcast and other ISPs are trying to get more control over the immense video traffic traversing their network in various ways. Providers must also manage the economic cost of upgrading their existing networks and the speed with which the upgrade can be physically imple-mented. While we can debate where the different companies are positioned in addressing these issues, industry experts tend to agree on one key fact: if all TV programming, including prime-time, was moved to IP, networks would crumble because the ecosystem is not yet prepared to handle those kinds of load levels.
Access networks (ISPs, cell/wireless carriers), especially those tied closely to content
producer companies, often offer content delivery services as well as media streaming services. This trend makes it difficult to follow who is competing with whom, and further complicates the FCC’s determination process to identify whether there is a net neutrality issue or a technical issue (or a combination of the two). While assuring seamless content delivery is obviously in everyone’s best interest, the line between the legal and the technical side is blurred and agreement upon what part each of the players (content owners, aggregators, distributors, etc.) should share in presenting a solution to the delivery problem varies. There are several existing audio and video streaming technology solutions and companies, creating a healthy competitive environment, but no single service, nor all of them combined, could solve the delivery at scale problem, largely because they all rely on the same and/or shared