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Vint Cerf sees a future in broadcasting - June 25, 2008

Paradoxical thought of the day: Google's chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf, often called the "father of the Internet" for his work at Arpanet in the 1970s, thinks Internet engineers could learn a lesson from old fashioned TV and radio broadcasters about transmitting video over a digital network. In an interview by Beet.TV's Andy Plesser, Cerf said it may be time to rethink Internet protocols to allow for point-to-multi-point transmissions of popular files rather than relying on a massive number of individual point-to-point transmissions.

The video of the full interview, which is worth watching in its entirety, can be found here, or here in Content Agenda's video library.

Here's my rough transcript of the relevant part, about six minutes in:

I’m foreseeing that video will be used in download mode more much more than it will be used in streaming mode as time goes on. If the capacities of the Net get high enough, you can download video—like a gigabit per second would let you download an hour’s worth of video in 16 seconds, sort of like you have with iPod, where you can download music faster than you can listen to it. So I anticipate that a lot of the video people will watch will have been downloaded and then played back whenever they want, sort of TiVo style.

Perhaps more importantly, though Internet not taking advantage of broadcast media. Turned broadcast media into point to point links, which is what you see with wWiFi, for example. What we could be doing is rethinking some of the protocols so that if you have a broadcast medium you actually use it to deliver the same thing to a large number of people at the same time, which is what Television and radio do. It’s very efficient, it’s very effective for delivering the same thing.. So if 65,000 people want to watch the same movie, then you broadcast it. Don’t send 65,000 separate copies. If two people want a copy it might be perfectly sensible to deliver that to them as a file transfer and let them play it back.

The cost of storage is so low, the cost of video processing is so low, that doing things in real time may not be necessary anymore. So I’m anticipating a shift in the way people use video.

Cerf was talking about using a broadcast model to lighten the burden that video increasingly places on network bandwidth. But such a change could also radically alter the economics of online video for the content owner.

Sending 65,000 separate copies of a movie instead of one copy to 65,000 viewers means significantly higher bandwidth costs, it forces content owners to have to purchase CDN service to manage all those separate transmissions, it requires additional servers and generally raises the content owners' fixed costs, undercutting economies of scale. The beauty of a broadcast model is that your marginal costs approach zero as you increase volume.

That would change a lot of things about the business.

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