4 ms·

I believe they were referring to number of receivers of the broadcast for scale. Distance from the tower being the limitation.

dmurray 8y ago
Yeah, for events like the World Cup "scale" means sending the same broadcast to millions of receivers. That's already an unusual requirement, though. Major sporting events constitute the biggest use case, and perhaps even those will require something different in future if the next trend is something more interactive: VR or user controlled camera angles.
- untog 8y ago
  > sending the same broadcast to millions of receivers. That's already an unusual requirement, though Broadcast television isn't particularly unusual, surely. Millions of people watch live, primetime TV every day.
  - blowski 8y ago
    In the UK, typical peak usage is around 5 million for the same program at the same time. The World Cup was more than 30 million.
    - untog 8y ago
      Sure, but my point was that five million receivers is "millions of receivers", and is an everyday occurrence.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        This is a legacy way of consuming material. More and more are using on demand first. However the use case of live sport - especially football in the uk - is massively different. This means the platforms have to scale to 20 million plus live streams (that's say 100tbit and 5 second latency) for a once in 4 year event.
laumars 8y ago
That's "just" a problem with unicast though. Lots of different media houses are working on getting multicast support over the internet, by which point IP streams will behave a lot more like OTA's one-to-many relationship. I couldn't say how close they are to getting that working - nor if it even is possible - because I don't work on that specific side of things. But I do know there used to be multicast networks over the internet back in the 90s (IIRC David Bowie even streamed one of his concerts over it) so it strikes me as a solvable problem.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Bbc did multicast 20 years ago, and with most uk households on one of half a dozen isps it would be possible. However multicast struggles over wifi and 4g. A CDN edge box in each exchange would probably solve the problem.

dmurray 8y ago

Yeah, for events like the World Cup "scale" means sending the same broadcast to millions of receivers. That's already an unusual requirement, though. Major sporting events constitute the biggest use case, and perhaps even those will require something different in future if the next trend is something more interactive: VR or user controlled camera angles.

untog 8y ago
> sending the same broadcast to millions of receivers. That's already an unusual requirement, though Broadcast television isn't particularly unusual, surely. Millions of people watch live, primetime TV every day.
- blowski 8y ago
  In the UK, typical peak usage is around 5 million for the same program at the same time. The World Cup was more than 30 million.
  - untog 8y ago
    Sure, but my point was that five million receivers is "millions of receivers", and is an everyday occurrence.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      This is a legacy way of consuming material. More and more are using on demand first. However the use case of live sport - especially football in the uk - is massively different. This means the platforms have to scale to 20 million plus live streams (that's say 100tbit and 5 second latency) for a once in 4 year event.

laumars 8y ago

That's "just" a problem with unicast though. Lots of different media houses are working on getting multicast support over the internet, by which point IP streams will behave a lot more like OTA's one-to-many relationship. I couldn't say how close they are to getting that working - nor if it even is possible - because I don't work on that specific side of things. But I do know there used to be multicast networks over the internet back in the 90s (IIRC David Bowie even streamed one of his concerts over it) so it strikes me as a solvable problem.

isostatic 8y ago
Bbc did multicast 20 years ago, and with most uk households on one of half a dozen isps it would be possible. However multicast struggles over wifi and 4g. A CDN edge box in each exchange would probably solve the problem.