More ABC Speculation

The Financial Times takes a look at some problems ABC could face it the recently annouced online video service is too successful.

From the Financial Times:

“Initially, people are willing to put up with the degraded experience,” said Tom McInerney, co-founder of Guba.com, an online video site that streams about 30m videos a month. “But expectations will rise quickly.”

In commercial terms, streaming represents a potential breakthrough for network television companies, since it offers a new “foolproof” way to deliver adverts, said Josh Martin, an analyst at IDC.

Since ABC can determine the rate at which the video stream is delivered, it can prevent viewers from fast-forwarding through the adverts, as they would be able to do through a digital video recorder connected to a TV set.

However, the technological demands involved in sending individual video streams across the network to each viewer are likely to prove too taxing for existing infrastructure, experts say.

The computing and network stresses created by streaming has led to a number of attempted “fixes”. They include services from companies such as Akamai, which specialise in optimising the way data travel across the internet, as well as so-called “peer-to-peer” technology, which relies on transferring data between individual consumers as way to get around the bottlenecks in the internet."