New internet-based delivery technologies hold out the promise to disrupt traditional media delivery mechanisms and make TV moguls out of every one, challenging traditional business models
Ever considered launching a television or radio channel of your own? The biggest entry barrier today to a new media venture, particularly broadcasting, is distribution. If it’s a TV channel, one has to book space on a satellite and negotiate with cable operators across the country to carry the new channel on their platform.
While satellite capacity can be relatively cheaper, persuading cable operators to carry your channel is another story, involving both money and considerable on-the-ground lobbying.
Now imagine launching a TV channel on a platform that reaches millions of viewers across the world—with just a home broadband connection. Sounds impossible? Not if you have heard of companies like Joost, Livestation and TVU Networks.
“Aspiring broadcasters need only content of their own, a Windows or Linux PC, a broadband Internet connection, and our freely downloadable application,” says Kap Shin, EVP at California-based TVU Networks. “Even if you are an amateur broadcaster, you can create channels about your travels, your hobbies, or your children’s sports teams, or just put up a great webcam,” he adds.
All that TVU’s free software requires is a five Mbps broadband connection, which is classified as home broadband in many countries. (While some providers offer upto eight Mbps on a residential connection, many offer only a maximum of two Mbps in India.) And if you just want to watch TV on your PC using their software, you need a connection with only one-tenth of the speed. Of course, viewers will also need to download the viewer application.
The biggest difference between these services and the older, browser-based services is in terms of the end-user experience. While on a browser-based service like youtube.com the selection of videos are of shorter duration (usually two to ten minutes), the new breed of services offer continuous channels in addition to video-on-demand. In addition, unlike the low-quality (low-resolution) videos on most web-based services, the new services offer resolutions from standard definition TV to HDTV.
How does it work?
The new breeds of services get their edge from the difference in the way in which they deliver content to the end-user. While the traditional method of delivering content on the Internet is no different from the one that is used to deliver normal web pages, the new services use different approaches.
Traditionally, content is transferred when a user’s computer (the client) requests for some information from another computer on the Internet that hosts it (the server.) The server then chops the content into packets, slaps on the address of the end-receiver on each packet and pushes it onto the Internet. Once out there, the packets are further pushed or guided to their end-destination by many devices called routers, based on the destination address found on them, much like a courier service that routes a packet meant for you.
While the system worked very well for text, for heavier content such as high-quality audio and video, it becomes increasingly unsuited and uneconomical.
“The world is moving towards video as a main form of communication and the older method may not be the best solution,” says Ranajoy Punja, VP with Cisco. “Under the earlier technology, if there are 100 people who want to watch a particular video stream or event, the server replicates the content 100 times and sends it out 100 times, one to each viewer,” Punja explains. “While that was okay for text, there are two problems when you apply it to video. One is that replicating the video stream for each new viewer takes up too much of the server’s processing capacity. Second is that it consumes too much bandwidth.”
To get an idea of the difference in scale, a typical webpage, on which a user may spend two to five minutes on, usually ‘weighs’ between 200 to 600 KB while a compressed, standard-definition video stream of five minutes will be at least 20,000 KB. Jeremy Penston, a London-based networking consultant estimates on his ‘IP Development Network’ blog that bandwidth requirements at the consumer end will increase 159 times if people started watching TV on the Internet.
Under traditional Internet models, when the end-user data usage goes up, it also means the servers where the content originates also become busier by a similar extent.
“We spend around Rs 7,000 every month on server and bandwidth,” says Shreyas Shrinivasan, who along with Gaurav Vaz own ‘RadioVeRVe’—a Bangalore-based Internet radio service. Though an audio streaming service such as RadioVeRVe takes up bandwidth of only one-sixth to one-tenth of an online video streaming service, every extra listener increases the load on the server. RadioVeRVe currently sees around 20,000-30,000 unique visitors a month.
“We have to pay extra if more people tune in,” says Gopal Swami, proprietor of Tamil Nadu-based Flash Networks that operates summaradio.com. While an increasing audience is cause for unadulterated celebration in a normal media firm, for Swami it has also meant that his hosting charges have now come up by 40% of his total expenses of Rs 60,000 last month. “The usage has been increasing ever since we started the service four months ago. It was three lakh listeners last month, up from around one lakh in the month before that,” he says. Swami also has to pay Rs 12,000 a month as royalty charges for the music from around 2,000 films, every month. Compared to this, Swami’s only income is the Rs 30,000 per month that he gets from selling advertisements on the radio station.
Both RadioVeRVe and summaradio.com use the traditional server-client model of transmitting information, which means that each new user increases the load on the server. The economics of broadcasting on the Internet become even more daunting when one moves to video due to the high server capacities needed.
It is this problem that the new breed of broadcast technologies is trying to address.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
