Neal Sandler writes:
... a startup called Arootz ... says it has devised a solution [to bandwidth problems for video content] that greatly increases the Net's ability to deliver video without requiring substantial new infrastructure. The approach takes advantage of two existing (and not very esoteric) technologies: a standard Internet feature known as multicasting, by which the same information can be sent simultaneously to many recipients using just one data stream; and off-the-shelf hard drives that can store vast amounts of data fast and cheap. ¶ The combination of the two represents a radical new approach to using the Net. Here's how it works: In today's world, when a person sitting at a PC clicks a link to watch a video, a series of servers delivers the content from its source to the end user in what's essentially an individualized person-to-person channel. If 10,000 people in a city all want to watch Desperate Housewives, each one of them gets their own personal bandwidth-hogging data stream. ¶ Imagine, instead, that by keeping track of basic patterns and preferences, an ISP could anticipate that those 10,000 viewers might want to watch Housewives in a predictable time window—say, within 24 hours after each episode was released. So rather than delivering 10,000 individual streams whenever the viewers choose to watch the show, the ISP can blast it simultaneously via multicasting (using far less bandwidth) to capacious hard drives in all 10,000 homes, and then the customers can watch the show at their leisure directly from an in-home media server. ...
Link: BusinessWeek.
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