We saw in Chapter 13 that the Internet provides a “best effort,” i.e., “no effort” service. So, how can it support video distribution that often imposes stringent demands on throughput and delay?

A Short Answer

Viewing models

Watching video is a significant part of many people's daily life, and it is increasingly dependent on the Internet and wireless networks. Movies, TV shows, and home videos flow from the cloud through the IP network to mobile devices. This trend is changing both the networking and the entertainment industries. As of 2011, there were more than 100 million IPTV users in the USA, and Youtube and Netflix together take up about half of the Internet capacity usage. As the trend of decoupling among contents, content delivery channels, and content-consuming devices intensifies, IP has become the basis of almost all the content distribution systems.

This trend is bringing about a revolution in our viewing habits.

1. • Content type: Both user-generated and licensed content have become prevalent. Clearly, more user-generated content implies an increasing need for upload capacity, which is traditionally designed to be much smaller than download capacity.

2. • When: For many types of video content, we can watch them anytime we want, with the help of devices like a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) on IPTV or services like HBO Go.

3. • Where: We can watch video content almost anywhere, at least anywhere with a sufficiently fast Internet connection.

4. […]