As a follow-up to last week's post about television service and the way that television shows (and movies) are typically made available in a "digital" format, I did want to mention that I had an opportunity to test Hulu on my connection. The record will show that I have a 1.5 megabit DSL connection from the local Telco, and that I operate a server on it, as well as for any requests I make of the Internet at large. I have a network connection on my iPhone and iPad, but those are under heavy quota restrictions and I do not use those connections very frequently at home, because I am in a poor signal area.
The results were as I suppose you could expect them to be. I loaded up and was able to stream Reaper from the desktop version of Internet Explorer on the Surface RT and watch it at "automatic" streaming quality with relatively little in terms of delays, lag, or buffering. I got into the show, so as a further test, I kept playing the show while (on another computer) I loaded and played World of Warcraft. My pings on WoW remained usable (less than 200ms, which I know many people think of as utterly insane and unplayable) and the video continued. The biggest problem I had was that there was a time when the player itself failed, but I believe that was a problem more with the Flash plugin than with Hulu.
Hulu is just one of many data points and I remain convinced that I was utterly lucky to have such full use of my connection during prime time on Friday night. (I'm on a remote terminal that feeds up to eight 1.5 megabit DSL connection off of a single 1.5 megabit T1 line. There's nothing magical about the T1 and I'm sure I'm either shutting the other customers out of their connections, or whenever any of them does anything, my ability to stream video immediately stops.
With most streaming video services, you can pause to buffer, but there seems to be a pretty low limit on what you can actually buffer. (Youtube no longer lets you buffer even a short video all the way through, which is why I started using a youtube video downloading application.)
I don't know if I mentioned it last week, but the issues I presented would likely be less of an issue for me if I had a 10 megabit or faster connection and could reliably get those speeds or close to it from content distributors.
The other thing I wanted to talk to specifically for a moment is the immense and variable cost of content from iTunes, which is probably my most practical option for video content today. TV seasons can cost anywhere from $15 to $57 a pop (I'm not kidding, Star Trek: The Next Generation is $56.99 each season) and movies can cost anywhere from about $5 each to about $20 each, just depending on the age and whether or not it's part of one of iTunes' movie bundles – of which there are a slim few.
Movies can be rented for a few dollars, but I don't know the exact details on those, and whether the period you can watch it starts from when you start downloading it or from when you hit the play button.
I get that video content is expensive to make and expensive to transmit and even that it takes a majority of the available network throughput on the Internet, but it seems like we shouldn't be responding to increases in network traffic by simply lamenting the fact that video content exists.
The whole issue of video on the Internet continues to be even more complicated and run fairly deep into the infrastructure of the thing. At the core of the problem is that network peering links can by their nature no longer be a one to one (or even close) relationship. Netflix is always going to be sending more data through the backbone providers than the residential networks are going to be sending to Netflix and other customers at that end of the pipe. This, and languishing links between ISPs, is one of the things that keeps connections of certain speeds from delivering content at those speeds. That problem needs to be fixed, but I still maintain there's ways to alleviate the issue.