I wonder if we're going to eventually lose institutional memory of the efficiency of broadcast systems. Today, the obvious answer for traffic data is to make i

I wonder if we're going to eventually lose institutional memory of the efficiency of broadcast systems. Today, the obvious answer for traffic data is to make it an on-demand "pull" service. So a million users means a million individual requests for the same data clogging the infrastructure, and a server and/or caching infrastructure ready to service one million requests scattered within the window of 7:30 to 8:30 AM. A broadcast "push" model would only need to make a few transmissions-- with effectively zero load balancing and distribution hardware-- to cover the same million users, and the client box would just listen and cache. A more ambitious idea might be caching CDN nodes-- potentially at the neighbourhood or single-customer level-- that were fed with popular data on a broadcast basis. Netflix pre-streams Episode 1 of every new series to your cable modem, so on "release day" there's a guaranteed smooth experience.