Lock-in ?!

After reading some FAQ's I learned that Adobe is trying to lock customers into their technologies after all.

MPEG-4 is supposed to be an open standard, allowing technologies from different vendors to interoperate. That's the fundamental idea behind MPEG-4.

But, Adobe states that they won't allow third party mediaservers to stream MPEG-4 to Flash Player.

Adobe has chosen to support MPEG-4 containers and codecs, but fails to choose the MPEG-4 transport protocol (RTSP) but instead chooses their own proprietary RTMP protocol.

Adobe will force customers to use their extremely expensive Flash Media Server instead of great MPEG-4 mediaservers such as Darwin/QuickTime Streaming Server.

P2P not holy grail

I agree to the overview of the story, that WebTV is going to compete with IPTV and traditional cable/satellite. In the Netherlands we call this 'Open Play' as opposite to triple play.

But I disagree on P2P being the solution to bring QoS.

The current issue with Internet capacity is that most web streams are distributed from a central site, or a web-CDN like Akamai or VitalStream. The costs are huge, there is no chain-to-chain QoS guarantee, and the ISP networks are filled up quickly so you can't really scale. From a content owner this is not a ideal situation.

P2P TV aimes to solve this. But in order to offer some kind of reliability, P2P has to generate multiple upstreams for each viewer which are in total over 140% of the actual needed bandwidth for a single viewer if you would stream it from a regular streaming server. Yes, P2P generates MORE traffic per viewer than regular streaming! This means that each ISP has to significantly upgrade their network, which, well, costs millions. On a macro level, costs increase. Costs move from content owners to ISP's. As a result, we see ISP's throttle bandwidth: P2P traffic is filtered and capped, so the actual result is even a lower QoS.

Higher costs for the ISP, lower QoS for the content owner and the viewer... P2P TV is currently the least efficient solution!

Overhere in the Netherlands, we have a lot of experience with On-Network CDN rollout. Instead of using expensive external web CDN's, and instead of upgrading ISP backbones, we use our CDN technology and roll it out in each ISP network. Each ISP CDN is a node in a nationwide CDN. No transit, no traffic costs. Very high QoS. Much cheaper than Akamai, Limelight or Vitalstream, and much more reliable than P2P TV. Extremely scalable! Total cost of ownership per ISP is less than 0,25 euro per subscriber over a period of 3 years. And since we can co-operate with the ISP's we can guarantee HD quality streams in Flash Video, WMV or H.264. Unless the viewer has a crappy WiFi connection of course.

Stef (jetstream.eu)