The Pixel Farm

After spending some time on the Radio and Internet Newsletter site (RAIN), I came away with the impression that the one of the largest issue facing Internet Radio, and other forms of on-demand rich media, is that of the development and maintenance of efficient content delivery frameworks.  The delivery model used by most Internet streaming services today can be classified under the “unicast” model – in this model, a stream of content is duplicated each time a new client decides to log on and tune in.  One can see that this delivery mechanism can quick overwhelm the network infrastructure if too many people try to access content at the same time.  Of course, software engineers have been working on this problem for a long time, and many stop-gap fixes do exist to help provide a more reliable use experience, such as smarter, more efficient compression techniques.

Thankfully, it looks as though content delivery providers are also working hard to increase their capacity to allow more information to pass across their networks.  Take, for example, Sprint’s announcement that it will be upgrading its wireless networks allow for a 4x increase in available capacity when compared to a standard 3G network.  This is good news, especially given the fact that AT&T reported that the iPhone caused a 5000% increase in the use of data transfer capacity since its release.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:30 am and is filed under Live Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.