Internet: Not Ready For Prime Time
I’m not an engineer, so I don’t understand the technicalities of this, but Michael Jackson almost killed the Internet. People who do understand the technicalities are saying this is just a sample of how the Internet would be crippled it there were an actual large scale calamity.
Every time I start rambling about Internet delivered video, someone always says, “What about the bandwidth?” I live under the naive assumption that Internet bandwidth expands constantly under some kind of Moore’s Law equation, but I guess that’s not true. Does this hinder the eventuality that much of the video content that we consume will come through the Internet?
Is this any different from any other networked technology? On September 11th our cellphones stopped working… I imagine for some people, Jacko’s death was a 9/11-esque event (?). Is your concern that in the event of a nuclear attack, we may not be able to watch the Kim Kardashian reality show on Hulu?
My Kardashian collection is safely on DVD.
The concern is that there isn’t sufficient bandwidth in the Internet universe to stream all of the video content that we wish was available. If you believe the pundits, there is a deluge of video content about to get crammed down the pipeline, and wired directly to our TVs in HD. Does the current available bandwidth need to be expanded? I’m sure someone is working on that business, but I’ve never here anyone discuss what the specific bandwidth requirements are for consumers to be watching HD internet videos “en masse.”