I did tune into MNF last night for awhile when the service wasn't freezing. I will say it again. When working, the PQ is outstanding. Equal to or rivaling satellite. Unfortunately, the freezing issues that plague the service are not likely to go away anytime soon. A few minor issues fixed and I would actually ditch satellite. I just don't see any kind of aggressiveness in wanting to do so.
DIRECTV NOW LAUNCH
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Interesting article on this issue. I don't see this happening if for no other reason that losing rural viewers who rely on satellite TV and probably do not have access to high speed internet.
http://cordcuttersnews.com/att-plans-move-directv-subscribers-new-streaming-service/
That article is a bit old (Oct/2016) and is just nice click bait IMO. In order for ATT to have that as a realistic goal they'd first have to figure out how to get enough bandwidth out there to support it at a reasonable price. Nothing indicates that will happen any time soon, certainly not in 3-5 years.
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I'm actually fine with that as long as these bugs are worked out. I've noticed PQ similar to sat so Directv most likely has the compression software and needs worked out. I don't like the 2 minute lag or so behind actual live events or the inability to sync devices so that multiple TV's in any one location have varying degrees of lag between each other when tuned to the same channel.
3 Year seems to be enough time to get all the necessary contracts in place and to be able to scale to an ever growing number of subscribers. This does not bode well for cable operators as consumers will actually have a real choice over cable without the excuse of not being able to put up a dish or having the wrong view of the Southern sky.
Directv Now has great potential. Once it scrapes its bruised and battered face off the floor.
That article about converting everything to streaming don't make sense.
20 million US DirecTV subscribers. DirecTV NOW is currently pushing out 8mbps per HD stream. (0.008 gigabit)
20,000,000 subs * 0.008 gigabit = 160,000gigabits/second to deliver 1 feed to every subscriber.
(160,000gbps / 8bits/Byte) * 60sec/min * 60min/hour = 72,000,000 GB per hour. 72 PETABytes/hour.
Let's lay that up against CDN pricing:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
AWS tops out their published scale at 5PB per month, and we'd be talking about pushing over 14x that per HOUR.
So let's come up with the most favorable possible pricing here:
The average person watches 5 hours of TV per day: http://www.recode.net/2016/6/27/12041028/tv-hours-per-week-nielsen
For this ideal scenario, let's say those 20 million DirecTV subs only represent a single viewer each.
Let's also assume DirecTV finds some way to cut their bandwidth in half, and is able to maintain quality at 4mbps. This takes it from 72PB down to 36PB per hour.
So:
36,000,000 GB/hour for 20mil viewers * 5 hours = 180,000,000GB per 24 hour period
180,000,000GB * 30 days/month = 5,400,000,000GB/month
Let's use AWS Cloudfront pricing of $0.02/GB and assume they're able to get a 50% discount at scale.
5,400,000,000GB * $0.01/GB = $54,000,000/mo in bandwidth distribution costs.
The last standalone DirecTV quarterly financial report was from June 2015, and can be found here: http://quicktake.morningstar.com/stocknet/secdocuments.aspx?symbol=dtv
Broadcast operations expenses for the quarter ending June 30, 2015: $118 million
They define broadcast operating expenses as: "...expenses include broadcast center operating costs, signal transmission expenses (including costs of collecting signals for our local channel offerings), and costs of monitoring, maintaining and insuring our satellites. Also included are engineering expenses associated with deterring theft of our signal."
So if they are able to cut their streaming bandwidth rates down to 4mbps, and every subscriber only steams the daily equivalent of 1 feed at 5 hours or less, and they are able to negotiate CDN pricing for half of the current lowest published rates they still spend at least $44 million more per quarter to do so, and that's only after they shut down their satellite distribution network to bring those costs down to $0. Even still, not all of the old $118 million goes away, because they still need to maintain a network to collect local channels if they want to bundle them into the streaming package.
This topic keeps coming up and my head just spins -- even if the engineering were possible to convert everything to Internet streaming, it's financial suicide.
20 million US DirecTV subscribers. DirecTV NOW is currently pushing out 8mbps per HD stream. (0.008 gigabit)
20,000,000 subs * 0.008 gigabit = 160,000gigabits/second to deliver 1 feed to every subscriber.
(160,000gbps / 8bits/Byte) * 60sec/min * 60min/hour = 72,000,000 GB per hour. 72 PETABytes/hour.
Let's lay that up against CDN pricing:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
AWS tops out their published scale at 5PB per month, and we'd be talking about pushing over 14x that per HOUR.
So let's come up with the most favorable possible pricing here:
The average person watches 5 hours of TV per day: http://www.recode.net/2016/6/27/12041028/tv-hours-per-week-nielsen
For this ideal scenario, let's say those 20 million DirecTV subs only represent a single viewer each.
Let's also assume DirecTV finds some way to cut their bandwidth in half, and is able to maintain quality at 4mbps. This takes it from 72PB down to 36PB per hour.
So:
36,000,000 GB/hour for 20mil viewers * 5 hours = 180,000,000GB per 24 hour period
180,000,000GB * 30 days/month = 5,400,000,000GB/month
Let's use AWS Cloudfront pricing of $0.02/GB and assume they're able to get a 50% discount at scale.
5,400,000,000GB * $0.01/GB = $54,000,000/mo in bandwidth distribution costs.
The last standalone DirecTV quarterly financial report was from June 2015, and can be found here: http://quicktake.morningstar.com/stocknet/secdocuments.aspx?symbol=dtv
Broadcast operations expenses for the quarter ending June 30, 2015: $118 million
They define broadcast operating expenses as: "...expenses include broadcast center operating costs, signal transmission expenses (including costs of collecting signals for our local channel offerings), and costs of monitoring, maintaining and insuring our satellites. Also included are engineering expenses associated with deterring theft of our signal."
So if they are able to cut their streaming bandwidth rates down to 4mbps, and every subscriber only steams the daily equivalent of 1 feed at 5 hours or less, and they are able to negotiate CDN pricing for half of the current lowest published rates they still spend at least $44 million more per quarter to do so, and that's only after they shut down their satellite distribution network to bring those costs down to $0. Even still, not all of the old $118 million goes away, because they still need to maintain a network to collect local channels if they want to bundle them into the streaming package.
This topic keeps coming up and my head just spins -- even if the engineering were possible to convert everything to Internet streaming, it's financial suicide.
Where did you see that info about the 8 Mbps streaming rate? That's a fairly healthy bitrate for 1080p MPEG4 content and would explain why many of the channels look so good. Comcast is currently sending 1080i down-rezzed to 720p at just under 4 Mbps for their standard run-of-the-mill cable TV service. And yes, it looks like crap.
Multicast doesn't work over the Internet (as you well know).
But let's say it did -- how are you going to provide cloud DVR functions and bandwidth adaptive streams using multicast?
Not to mention how many people are running home routers that can process multicast subscription messages? Or are running switches with the necessary protocol independent multicast features? I'd bet you dinner for a week it's less than 1%.
Even if you could get multicast to your cable/DSL modem, you're screwed as you get deeper into almost all home networks.
Packet capture. It's evident in both the transmit bitrate, and in the header decode.
Is that an average, constant or highest bitrate you've seen? I'm curious as it just seems rather high to me given the file format and content. Since it's "live" streaming I suppose it doesn't allow for more advanced compression techniques the likes of Netflix and others use.
I pretty sure that's how they do it.
Multicasting is a more efficient kind of streaming that allows a streaming server to produce a single stream that many people can watch or listen to simultaneously—for example, if lots of people are watching a football game live online at the same time. Some media players automatically use multicasting when they can.
Combined with IPTV IP multicasting http://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-iptv-works.html
That's the highest I've seen across all the channels, typically on channels like the NHL network. What's interesting is the bitrate is lower on channels like NBC Sports Network (5mbps), but I think they're bundling a feed they're actually getting directly from NBC there. If you watch the channel, instead of commercials you get an NBCSN splash screen.
Yes, I've seen that splash screen on several channels. As you note, it appears that there are a few different types of streams being used for the service.
I was under the impression that they just had not sold separate add space for those. As I see it on vue all the time as well
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Not over the Internet, no.
Multicast isn't supported on the Internet for a number of reasons, some billing, some political, some technical, but mostly from a security standpoint. Multicast uses network infrastructure to replicate packets to all endpoints. When an endpoint submits a multicast join request, each router follows its routing table upstream and processes join requests until it reaches the source. It builds a tree that looks like this:
If multicast were supported on the Internet, and I as a bad guy were able to get a publicly acknowledged address allocation, I could write malware that would cause infected machines to join my multicast group. I could then generate multicast traffic into that group, and if an ISP had 20 million infected hosts, for every 1 packet I send in, the ISP's network would create 20 million end copies for me. Even if you're not intentionally doing anything nefarious, software bugs have enabled multicast to melt down numerous networks over the years.
That's not to say multicast isn't used in pockets all over the place -- that's how ATT handles live video distribution in U-verse, but that traffic never touches the Internet, and ATT owns all of the endpoints.
That's part of it.
The reason I say it's likely they're re-bundling an NBC-created streaming feed is that if you watch NBC Sports Network through the NBCSN App the feed is identical in both bitrate and commercial splash page content as what they show on the DirecTV NOW "channel". I think for other channels that don't have an existing streaming platform (ie, NHL Network) they're actually generating their own stream from their source fiber/satellite feed they use for DirecTV satellite service.
This might be stipulated in the streaming contract for some of their content producers; one reason to do this would be for a network like NBC to compare the distributed streams to their originals to make sure a provider like Vue or DTVN isn't modifying it to inject their own ads or otherwise alter the broadcasts outside of the designated commercial insert slots.
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