Jason Dunn
03-07-2006, 04:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060302.html' target='_blank'>http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060302.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Twenty million viewers, on average, watch "Desperate Housewives" each week in about 10 million U.S. households. That's 210 megabytes times 10 million downloads, or 2.1 petabytes of data to be downloaded per episode. Fortunately for the download business model, not everyone is trying to watch the show at the same time or in real time, so iTunes, in this example, has some time to do all those downloads. Let's give them three days. The question on the table is what size Internet pipe would it take to transfer 2.1 petabytes in 72 hours? I did the math, and it requires 64 gigabits-per-second, which would require an OC-768 fiber link and two OC-256s to fulfill."</i><br /><br />An interesting article about the impact that peer to peer technologies will have on digital media content distribution. There's a lot of logic in his arguments, but there's a flaw as well: there's an assumption on his part that the numbers will be the same when critical mass is reached, and that simply doesn't make any sense. A transition from our current distribution methods to a true P2P system will take at least a decade to accomplish. Are networking technologies going to stand still during that time? No, of course not - and as such, things will be different when it happens. The basic idea of P2P is still a winner though - the real question is who has the right mix of functionality.