Can the web take our hunger for streaming?
Of all the facts and figures in this article on the rise of streaming and the death of discs, one is scarier than all the others. No, I’m not referring to all those stats – though they’re admittedly frightening – that track in gory detail the catastrophic decline of one of Britain’s most respected retailers, HMV. The decline of the CD and of the DVD is frightening, and important to understand. But still, that’s not the bit that really scares me.
What scares me is the information contained in the last two paragraphs: the part about Korea (that’s South Korea, the one with the technology and the modernity, not the one with the bonkers ideology
and the head-of-state that’s been dead 17 years.)
South Korea has the best, fastest broadband provision in the world.
But KT (Korea Telecom) recently announced it was to restrict access to the internet for Samsung Smart TVs, due to the huge and unsustainable demands such products have put on the country’s data networks.
Can the web take our hunger for streaming?
So, let me get this right. We have all been embracing a vision of the future in which content (whether movies, music, TV programmes, games or even books and magazines) is accessed via the internet, dispensing with the need for a physical object, and for a physical shop.
Look at that drop in HMV’s share price if you want proof of that. But what this news implies is that as soon as enough of us a) buy Smart products, and b) start using them, our beloved internet will break as easily as a cheap MP3 player.
UK broadband is still squirming uncertainly into the 21st century. Average speed here is 5.1Mbps, while the Korean average is 16.7Mbps. If trends continue as they are, we may end up finding ourselves with an internet that can’t satisfy our hunger for content.
- Joe Cox's blog
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Comments
It is clear to me that there now needs to be a separate entertainment internet for the benefit of the "streamers" and this should be of charged use.
It might have escaped your attention but the internet is "of charged use" already and so is an awful lot of streamed content.
Virgin/Sky/Spotify/Netflix/Lovefilm etc. etc. They all charge. (And two of those are amongst the biggest ISPs in the UK).
It needs a long-term act of will and investment from our Government, industry, BT (and all the other ISPs) to determine, once and for all, that the UK is going to catch up and exceed all of our needs for bandwidth. (Quantity and quality.)
Not just for entertainment, but - for instance - for everyone (at least everyone who can and wants to) to be able to work from home where practicable.
Every person who works from home frees up a space on the roads, frees up a car parking space, frees up some office space, frees up some petrol, unclogs their town or city by one car, and frees up some wasted commuting time to spend with family. (They start work without being frazzled by inevitable travel hassles and finish work without being tired and irritated from the journey home.) None of this is possible without plentiful and reliable internet capacity anywhere they happen to live.
while i agree to some of the details above there are very glaring omissions to the princaple of streaming.
1. ofc broadband speeds will increase duh where will the music/film industry be investing there money now. lmao
2. The overhead of a steaming service is still very low compared to say a game streaming site such as steam.(which is where all the korean broadband goes. ther starcraft fanatics
3. We have come along way in the last few years in the way data is compressed and uncompressed on the fly this will only get better as demand rises.
4. If you suffer from a service outage how is this any diffrent to going to the old video shop and there out of stock ?
5. If your home network is failing thats yer own dumb ass fault get better equipment to deal with it. If you really need full 4k vid and true dolby 70000000.1 surround sound im sure you would have the best internet and equipment to play this back.
6. Any disk is prone to being scrached damaged beyond all use. So how is that any diffrent to deleting or corrupting a digi download. At least with download they store the files for you, and you can retrive them at any time.