IP Multimedia Featured Article

The World Wide Broadcast

By Carl Ford, Partner, Crossfire Media

While I was touring around the conference associated with IPTV, the real goings-on of the Internet were being discussed at a joint ARIN / NANOG (News - Alert) meeting and the findings of the ATLAS Internet Observatory were truly amazing.

 

Turns out that migration to the browser for video has been slowing the growth of peer-to-peer solutions. In other words, the strategy of the content owners to provide a Web version of their content is making it so that most people are choosing those sites as a more convenient way to see the video.

 

The results have been to put the content at aggregation points in the network. This is not only with companies such as Akamai (News - Alert) or Limelight, but with companies like Comcast and Google.

 

Comcast, of course, is important because it has also been coping with concerns about blocking traffic. Other major players on the backbone are Level 3, AT&T and Global Crossing (News - Alert). The interesting aspect of this consolidation is that they represent a shift of network, which most people refer to as “cloud computing.”

 

The traffic pattern of the video is from distributed aggregation points out to the Web browsing subscribers from what Craig Labovitz, CTO of Arbor Networks referred to as “Hyper Giants” on the Internet.

 

These content providers are a force in the backbone market that is representing new buying power which has driven down the cost of wholesale Internet transit and increased their revenues from advertisement.

 

Former FCC (News - Alert) Chairman William Kennard years ago hoped that the broadcast model might be applied to the Internet, and it seems to some extent the model championed by William S. Paley may be evolving.

 

Comcast’s role as a backbone indicates a clear migration away from being an MSO model of supporting access to delivering wholesale services including wireless backhaul, video services to other MSO’s and a host of other services. Their traffic patterns have gone from being a consumer of content to a distributor seriously changing the price points for content delivery.

 

However, it is now primarily a top-down model where the value and the changes are happening because the ubiquity of the Web browser is driving almost all applications into Web. The few exceptions are the corporate VPN and games, but that games may migrate over time.

 

If you look at the impact of Google’s acquisition of YouTube (News - Alert), you would see that Google’s network has almost absorbed all of YouTube’s traffic to the point where 6 percent of the world wide traffic is on Google’s network.

 

The implications are that the Internet is once again becoming a disruptive network and its impacting, what we see, when we see and how we see the future.

Carl Ford is a partner at Crossfire Media.

Edited by Michael Dinan