One Movie: You Blow Your Monthly Data Plan

Something's gotta give here: Akamai has rolled out a high definition television delivery service, capable of delivering a two-hour feature-length movie encoded at a bit rate of at least 6-8 Mbps, with a resultant file size of 5 Gbytes to 8 GB. For those of you with some popular wireless broadband accounts, that's pretty much your "acceptable use" level of monthly consumption of data! And that's just your problem.

Assume the same bit of content were delivered to enough households to create one Nielsen ratings point. That's 1,102,000 households. Which means the delivery networks would require 6.6 Terabits per second of sustained bandwidth, assuming zero latency and zero network congestion!

I don't care who you are, your pipes are getting to be too small. Local area network bandwidth at enterprises is growing smartly, but consumer bandwidth won't be far behind, if in fact consumer bandwidth does not soon eclipse enterprise bandwidth in at least the downstream direction.

One HDTV movie. Two hours. Your whole monthly acceptable use consumption. Obviously there's not enough bandwidth.

Joost Chooses Level 3

Level 3 Communications has been selected by Joost to provide content delivery services for the new Internet television service. Under the terms of the agreement, Level 3 will provide Joost with network solutions including high speed Internet access and colocation services in North America and Europe. Level 3 has made a big commitment to providing CDN services and can claim, by means of its (former Vyvx)broadcast video services unit, to be supplying top U.S. cable and over-the-air broadcasters with a significant part of their overall backhaul and studio feed operations. The Joost deal will not make or break Level 3's CDN business or strategy. But it is a nice customer to have.