C Net reports that the high volume of video traffic on the net may soon slow everyone down. The article points to some of the net provider’s arguments against the content neutral Internet, and many of the comments reflect this. However, it goes on to discuss some of the potentials for new developments in video technology.
Itiva’s technology works by taking a huge movie file and breaking it up into tiny individual pieces that are formatted just like ordinary Web pages. When they’re downloaded by a user, these individual pieces–Itiva calls them “quanta”–are stored in ISPs’ Web caches, which are already distributed in every network.
Once stored separately like this, they can be quickly downloaded and pieced together by anyone else in that network, in a way that’s much more inexpensive for the ISP than if everyone was going back to the original download site.
This may really be the benefit of bandwidth hungy content’s move online: the drive of innovation. While creating a tiered net may be one solution, desire to push the existing network further through new technology (most likely relying on neutrality) is the way to go.
Thanks C Net for the good material on video this week 🙂