The search for a High-Definition Video on Demand solution

No relief from cheaper bandwidth

Today, the infrastructure is unable to provide instant high-definition streaming at a reasonable cost. However, the price of bandwidth will go down as ISPs upgrade their infrastructure.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is unlikely to provide any significant relief to Video on Demand services, because file sizes will increase as fast as the infrastructure allows it, canceling the potential savings in hosting costs.

Indeed, competition with physical formats (DVD, Blu-Ray) and pirate networks, which offer superior picture quality standards, will leave little choice to Video on Demand services but to improve the picture quality of their movies, and data volume as a result.

The propensity of video to capture improvements in network capacity has been observed on pirate networks since the early days of the Internet, and it is unlikely that legal offerings prove any different in the future.

Next page: There is no free lunch: the Peer-to-Peer illusion

Overview – Page 2 of 5 – Next page

Articles in that section

• Can Internet Video on Demand actually deliver?
• The search for a High-Definition Video on Demand solution
• An elegant way to fight widespread copyright infringement on the Internet
• Summary: Snowball® OpenDelivery™: a novel approach to content-delivery networks

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