BBC to stream top two channels live
Over the course of this year ISPs have seen peak demands on their networks with the BBC iPlayer traffic surging at the time of the Olympics and the US Election.
Next week the potential bandwidth demand moves into a new phase with the launch of live BBC1 & 2 programming “for licence payers” as discussed in the Times Online.
We are familiar with the National Grid using TV schedules to plan power generation capacity and we may be moving to a situation where you have to use the internet when there’s nothing good on TV if you want to get a decent speed.
The basic problem with broadcasting live TV over our current broadband infrastructure is that it is desperately inefficient. A TV transmitter can push out just one signal and it be received by millions, but the broadband iPlayer equivalent is the BBC sending out millions of individual 300 kbits/s video streams - one per viewer’s PC. This puts a high demand on ISP connections and on the backhaul to telephone exchanges as there is no existing capability to share one signal stream by using multicast techniques or localised cache servers.
Live streaming puts a concentrated peak demand at a given time unlike “catch up” services where viewers will watch many different shows at different times and spread the bandwidth demand over a longer time period. It is therefore likely there will be many exchanges of words in the media between the licence fee (tax) funded BBC, ISPs and customers if this service is popular. If you have built a network around 40 or 50 kbits/s per user average you can’t sustain many of them watching 300k video streams at the same time, so the service quality will deteriorate and possibly put people off the iPlayer due to stuttering and interruptions.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:57 am
Let’s hope ISPs start using Multicast soon, the BBC are offering it for streaming radio stations (or were before they moved to the iPlayer) so it’s not as if it’s out of reach.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Well to me - its fingers in the ears from the BBC.
Its about time they started working with the ISPs rather then dishing out further functions that can cripple networks.
As mentioned they should use localised cached servers but they won’t. They expect the ISP to have to upgrade all of its infrastucture instead at great cost.
If the BBC won’t pay for these upgrades; the customer will have to pay for it - ISPs don’t magic money up! If the customer has to pay for it - either prices go up now (in service packages) or ISPs will have to change pricing strategy so streaming/gaming/voip etc costs more then http users.
Or the BBC helps the ISPs! Host the content on ISPs VOD servers and let them use multicast!!
This seems a no brainer to me…
November 24th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Multicast is the only viable way forward for large scale live streaming online.
For live and scheduled content the BBC must take responsibility and work with the ISPs so this content can be multicast to the majority of broadband users. If they were to do this the ISPs would be quick to multicast-enable. In turn these ISPs can exert a much greater influence on the Access network provider (e.g. BT Wholesale) to multicast-enable the Access network where the bulk of the cost savings are to be made.
With LLU of course, the ISPs should have quite a few alternative Access network providers who will (I hope) give them a native multicast service!
No more prevaricating - the time for multicast has arrived!!
November 30th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
So the BBC has to pay for ISPs to upgrade their networks? I was stunned when I heard from a BBC employee that an UK ISP wanted to charge the BBC for putting Iplayer on their network. I mean WTF?
BBC iplayer is already fantastic free content. Why can’t a UK ISP differentiate by offering a better network for it?
I’ve also heard from a BBC insider that they’ve asked UK ISPs to upgrade many many years ago…
ISP business in the UK seems corrupt.