5 ms·

> next-gen media What does this mean? Something beyond video? VR?

by md224 7y ago

cjsawyer 7y ago
If the bandwidth is available then people will find a way to fill it. Streaming games, higher res video, remote terminals replacing low end PC hardware, who knows?
- md224 7y ago
  Good point, though I'll note that streaming games, high-res video, and remote terminals are already available (at least via high-speed ethernet connections), so the "next generation" would be higher quality or wider availability rather than genuinely new forms of media. My instinct is that there are diminishing returns past a certain point. We're certainly not there yet, but once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add. I see it as a philosophical issue... bandwidth is for the transmission of information, and there's only so much information that a human being can receive and provide at a given moment. At some point you're running up against the maximum bandwidth of the human user.
  - minton 7y ago
    So we up the bandwidth, something like Elon’s NueraLink.
  - vel0city 7y ago
    So here's an example of "next gen" media streaming in action. I was recently at a MotoGP race. MotoGP has a streaming media app that allows for you to stream cams from your favorite racers on your mobile device in very high quality. This would be really cool to use for the many hours of racing throughout the day at the race track, but while its technically possible with current technology for me to do it the cost is prohibitive. With significantly higher throughput per tower, the cost of data should significantly be reduced, making it really cheap to have a crowd of people at the race track have a few 1080p each.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      When hot dogs at sports stadiums cost $10 a pop, why do you think 1080p streams would be cheap?
      - Gpetrium 7y ago
        It is dependent on supply/demand and business model. You could have asked the same thing when Google/Yahoo as a search engine came into play "why do you think the knowledge of millions would be widely available and relatively cheap/"free"?
        darkpuma 7y ago
        The stadium has a monopoly on hot dogs and event streaming, so they can gouge you til their heart's content.
    - paulmd 7y ago
      On-demand streaming of identical content to hundreds of users at the same time is not an efficient use of bandwidth. It's like Netflix versus cable television - you can push the equivalent of hundreds of 1080p streams through a broadcast cable television, but attempting to push on-demand IP packets to an equivalent number of subscribers would bog down horrifically if they even attempted to stream a single show (let alone how you have cable tuners that can tune multiple shows at once). What you need there is something much more akin to broadcast television - either a digital OTA video broadcast (good ol' digital television), or a microcell using multicast to broadcast a stream to any interested party. (of course your phone probably doesn't have a DTV tuner, but when a RTL-SDR dongle is like $20, you should probably be asking why your phone isn't integrating that functionality. These days they don't even have FM tuners on phones anymore... despite the fact that in virtually all cases those are already built into the cellular chipset. IP-based singlecast is not a good paradigm for a lot of the use-cases that people come up with, it's just that it's the most profitable one for carriers, so it's the only one they'll support.)
      - vel0city 7y ago
  - est31 7y ago
    > once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add. Well there is this famous quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." from 1943 and it turned out to be very wrong. "High-definition VR content" isn't the same as "indistinguishable from reality". When movies were first introduced to theaters, with small frames per second rates, without color and without any sound on the medium itself, people were quite stunned and e.g. took cover when a the movie showed a train approaching at high speeds. Nowadays it seems primitive to us from a technological standpoint. There is a trend that some people don't accept lossy audio encoding. Maybe one day, videos will get a same trend and people want lossless videos, in full 360 degree VR, intensity resolution beyond perceptual limits and constantly high enough angular resolution for your eyes to foveate any area of the screen and see no pixels. That's quite a huge amount of data to transmit. Add in buffering so that you can seek, etc. As for genuinely new forms of media, I could think of some: full-body experiences with feeling of touch, smell, etc either live or recorded possibly professional in a studio or just you sharing your last vacation to venice. Taking it further: uploading your consciousness to a body which is a large distance away, making physical travel of humans mostly obsolete: Maybe one day we can represent the brains of human individuals as data and send it with light speed around the earth and throughout space.
- losteric 7y ago
  For how long? Is there a saturation and pull-back at some point? Personally, I used my home gigabit extensively the first few months... but a year later I frequently find myself still tethered to my cellphone's 4G plan. It doesn't make a difference except once in a blue moon when I want to download something big.
newsoul2019 7y ago
8k cat videos
mustacheemperor 7y ago
More like AR, if you can run a computationally complex AR environment in the cloud and stream it in realtime to thin client devices it reduces the requirements for portable glasses etc.

> next-gen media What does this mean? Something beyond video? VR?

by md224 7y ago

> next-gen media What does this mean? Something beyond video? VR?

If the bandwidth is available then people will find a way to fill it. Streaming games, higher res video, remote terminals replacing low end PC hardware, who knows?

md224 7y ago
Good point, though I'll note that streaming games, high-res video, and remote terminals are already available (at least via high-speed ethernet connections), so the "next generation" would be higher quality or wider availability rather than genuinely new forms of media. My instinct is that there are diminishing returns past a certain point. We're certainly not there yet, but once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add. I see it as a philosophical issue... bandwidth is for the transmission of information, and there's only so much information that a human being can receive and provide at a given moment. At some point you're running up against the maximum bandwidth of the human user.
- minton 7y ago
  So we up the bandwidth, something like Elon’s NueraLink.
- vel0city 7y ago
  So here's an example of "next gen" media streaming in action. I was recently at a MotoGP race. MotoGP has a streaming media app that allows for you to stream cams from your favorite racers on your mobile device in very high quality. This would be really cool to use for the many hours of racing throughout the day at the race track, but while its technically possible with current technology for me to do it the cost is prohibitive. With significantly higher throughput per tower, the cost of data should significantly be reduced, making it really cheap to have a crowd of people at the race track have a few 1080p each.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    When hot dogs at sports stadiums cost $10 a pop, why do you think 1080p streams would be cheap?
    - Gpetrium 7y ago
      It is dependent on supply/demand and business model. You could have asked the same thing when Google/Yahoo as a search engine came into play "why do you think the knowledge of millions would be widely available and relatively cheap/"free"?
      - darkpuma 7y ago
        The stadium has a monopoly on hot dogs and event streaming, so they can gouge you til their heart's content.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    On-demand streaming of identical content to hundreds of users at the same time is not an efficient use of bandwidth. It's like Netflix versus cable television - you can push the equivalent of hundreds of 1080p streams through a broadcast cable television, but attempting to push on-demand IP packets to an equivalent number of subscribers would bog down horrifically if they even attempted to stream a single show (let alone how you have cable tuners that can tune multiple shows at once). What you need there is something much more akin to broadcast television - either a digital OTA video broadcast (good ol' digital television), or a microcell using multicast to broadcast a stream to any interested party. (of course your phone probably doesn't have a DTV tuner, but when a RTL-SDR dongle is like $20, you should probably be asking why your phone isn't integrating that functionality. These days they don't even have FM tuners on phones anymore... despite the fact that in virtually all cases those are already built into the cellular chipset. IP-based singlecast is not a good paradigm for a lot of the use-cases that people come up with, it's just that it's the most profitable one for carriers, so it's the only one they'll support.)
    - vel0city 7y ago
- est31 7y ago
  > once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add. Well there is this famous quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." from 1943 and it turned out to be very wrong. "High-definition VR content" isn't the same as "indistinguishable from reality". When movies were first introduced to theaters, with small frames per second rates, without color and without any sound on the medium itself, people were quite stunned and e.g. took cover when a the movie showed a train approaching at high speeds. Nowadays it seems primitive to us from a technological standpoint. There is a trend that some people don't accept lossy audio encoding. Maybe one day, videos will get a same trend and people want lossless videos, in full 360 degree VR, intensity resolution beyond perceptual limits and constantly high enough angular resolution for your eyes to foveate any area of the screen and see no pixels. That's quite a huge amount of data to transmit. Add in buffering so that you can seek, etc. As for genuinely new forms of media, I could think of some: full-body experiences with feeling of touch, smell, etc either live or recorded possibly professional in a studio or just you sharing your last vacation to venice. Taking it further: uploading your consciousness to a body which is a large distance away, making physical travel of humans mostly obsolete: Maybe one day we can represent the brains of human individuals as data and send it with light speed around the earth and throughout space.
losteric 7y ago
For how long? Is there a saturation and pull-back at some point? Personally, I used my home gigabit extensively the first few months... but a year later I frequently find myself still tethered to my cellphone's 4G plan. It doesn't make a difference except once in a blue moon when I want to download something big.

newsoul2019 7y ago

8k cat videos

mustacheemperor 7y ago

More like AR, if you can run a computationally complex AR environment in the cloud and stream it in realtime to thin client devices it reduces the requirements for portable glasses etc.