Will Your Content Change The Internet Weather?
“Hey, come take a look at this storm system. It’s enormous.” – Hideki, Japanese astronaut, The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Lots of people missed the big news of the Beijing Olympics. It wasn’t that Mark Phelps won 8 gold medals. It wasn’t that the U.S. edged out China on the total number of medals. It wasn’t the hundreds of personal tragedies and triumphs. Some of the competitors undoubtedly felt like Laura Chapman … “I know you always thought I took the competition too seriously … you were right. It was all for nothing.” The big news was that nothing happened. Sure The Chinese government and China’s CCTV was afraid. NBC was afraid. AT&T was afraid. BBC was afraid. Microsoft was afraid (they had a lot riding on Silverlight’s success). Limelight and Akamai were afraid. Afraid the video pipes of the world would collapse.
Didn’t happen!
The estimated 1.3 billion worldwide Internet users were more than four times the number of potential users that tried to access Mark Cuban’s broadcast.com “airing” of Victoria’s Secret show a decade ago.
The Games Begin
This online video challenge streamed more than 2200 hours of live competition in 25 sports. More than 112 video streams were often available at one time. All told 336 streams could have been sent out simultaneously. The content was available to 77 countries. The great thing was online viewers around the globe didn’t have to watch NBC’s version of the Olympics. Use your search engine, type in Beijing (or 2008) Olympics + country name and BAM! you could see the events from your favorite country’s perspective. Of course the Olympics gave the CWA (Communications Workers of America) the ideal platform to promote the fact that when it comes to real-time download capacity to the home (the last mile), the U.S. sucked! Guess they just found out that the U.S. is actually 15th in broadband to the home.
South Korea has been the gold standard for service for years. Four European Union (EU) countries have been deploying fiber faster than the US. Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands added more than 30 percent last year. They like that capacity so much they’re increasingly watching their TV shows (and other entertainment) online rather than from their other sources. Even the UK, Belgium, Luxembourg and France added more lines than the US. As “bad” as the US Internet infrastructure is, it hasn’t stopped folks from going online and watching video. And … there’s plenty to watch. Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute … and people watch it! TV shows around the globe are going to HighDef and HD uses at least 7x more bandwidth than SD.
Content Over Words
Research firm Current Analysis estimates that by 2010 more than 80 percent of the Internet traffic (up from today’s 30 percent) will be video. No wonder our kids can’t write their test essays. Hey, the new found freedom of being able to watch our entertainment / news at a time that is convenient to us rather than the network, station or cable guy if great. Avoiding the cable box is dynamite. Watch what Chris Anderson dubbed long tail stuff … content that is interesting, informative to us and maybe two, 2,000 or 200,000 folks on the globe is superb. Naturally once you’ve watched the stuff in HD you can’t be expected to watch SD can you? Of course not. And since it’s on the Internet it’s supposed to be free! The original Internet designers didn’t have us in mind but that’s the way we all treat it … a right, not a privilege. Suddenly a new phrase has emerged “network neutrality” which is right up there with “digital rights”… an idea with a lot of interpretations.
Depending upon your interpretation, it is either the ability of your service provider to “manage” what levels of service / sites you use or maintaining the openness supervised by the government. It’s hard to imagine how governments could supervise something like the Internet that has grown virally, widely and rapidly in about 30 years. The Internet isn’t about the last mile or the last 100 or 10 feet. It’s the network of networks not just in the US or EU or China or … It’s a physical infrastructure that is … everywhere. Say you’re working with dial-up (28.8Kbps if you can recall the ancient days) and are the only one on the Web server, the download would be fast. Add 1,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 people and things choke. Sorry baby it isn’t all about you, your high powered engine, your T1 connection (s). It’s the speed at the other end.
Front End
And the folks who built out the front end of the 2008 Olympics service built it out! Look down the list of supporting players and they were literally the who’s who of the industry plus some you never heard of. Sure China’s government dropped a big chunk of Yuan on the project. China’s government was like the Statue of Liberty guard … “I’ll just leave you alone to work on it, then.” Another thing they did you probably didn’t notice. They dropped even more Yuan (and yes other countries added currency) to string more high speed fiber optic cable under the Pacific between Asia and North America … still the biggest dog on the technology pack. There are bunches of these cables under the oceans of the world connecting our continents and countries. Most were laid around 2001 when everyone was starting a new company to take advantage of the overwhelming demand for Internet traffic and every VC was throwing money at the new ventures.
They all had visions of winning the gold. It’s finally here. Doesn’t do much for investors in firms like Global Crossing and MCI but then business is a serious game. Cisco and most industry analysts say that traffic will continue to grow at least 50 percent per year for at least the next five years. Heck YouTube sucks up more bandwidth than all of us who were online in 2000 searching for documents, data, information and content! Sure, there’s a lot of dark fiber lying on the ocean floor waiting to be lit. But all of the major players are partners in consortia that are investing billions to add more cable and meshed systems. It’s called redundancy. In addition, new technology for handling the onslaught of traffic is rapidly expanding and folks are learning how to handle the data packets with intelligence rather than brute force. As Parker said, “Have you ever seen the air so clear?” The Internet, Web 2.0 isn’t about entertainment. Lou Gerstner, former head of IBM, said it best years ago…“The Internet is about competition, growth and reaching out to customers.”
Global Benefits
Businesses and individuals around the globe have reaped the benefits. But the Internet infrastructure isn’t free! If you expect governments to fund and manage the Internet it will be as with most things – “No need to do that. It’s a one in a billion chance that would happen … you know a cold day in Hell!” As Sam Hall said … “So much for one in a billion.”
Government intervention in the Internet is just wrong. It goes against the competitive supply / demand equation that helped the Internet grow in every dimension so quickly and robustly. It has also reached the point where we’re going to have to realize Internet access isn’t a right. As Terry Rapson said, “I’m afraid that time has come and gone, my friend.”
Tiered service sucks? Higher monthly service charges suck? The Internet gives firms the most direct, most personalized, most individualized means of talking directly to you about their products, services. Let ‘em pay for the privilege of trying to grab your attention, interest, checkbook. Let them pay to play … you can focus on your movie.
