Smoothing the Way for Web Video

(page 2 of 2)

In a matchup broadcast online courtesy of CBSSports.com, Yusef Smith of the Saint Mary's Gaels shoots over Jimmy Graham of the Miami Hurricanes during the first round of the 2008 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on Mar. 21. Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

Even so, experts say it's unlikely these carriers could ever afford to install enough of the extra gear to satisfy demand for bandwidth. As such, they're using software tricks such as dynamic bandwidth allocation, reducing one user's capacity while he's browsing eBay (EBAY) to give his neighbor more bandwidth as he catches up on the latest 24 episode. And Comcast (CMCSA) has gotten itself embroiled in controversy by using technology to impede a certain kind of direct "peer-to-peer," or P2P, traffic between users. According to Cisco Systems, such P2P traffic chews up roughly 60% of consumer online traffic.

Another part of the solution will undoubtedly be so-called content distribution networks (CDNs) that offload video, music, ads, and other fare from the central servers. Akamai Technologies (AKAM), the king of this business, currently handles about 15% of all online traffic. With 30,000 servers installed in roughly 1,000 networks around the world, Akamai doles out everything from iTunes songs to all of those March Madness games.

BitGravity Offers High-Definition Quality

But new rivals insist Akamai's distributed approach is best suited for serving Web pages and photos—not interactive videos. Limelight Networks , which is handling the Oprah series, has just 7,000 servers, but they're far more powerful.

Rather than tying up network bandwidth by constantly resending big video files to Akamai's lower-capacity machines, Limelight's servers have the space to hold all of its customers' content. This cuts down on bandwidth costs and provides a more direct connection from a content owner to a viewer's PC. It's worth noting, however, that Limelight recently lost a patent-infringement suit to Akamai, which is due $45 million in damages and will seek an injunction prohibiting Limelight's further use of the offending technology. For his part, Akamai CEO Paul Sagan is nonplussed by rival's claims: "We've spent 10 years getting ready for the broadband explosion," he says. "Our original patents were all about video and rich media."

Meanwhile, a host of startups are pushing the state-of-the-art. BitGravity uses even fewer, but more powerful servers than Limelight. It promotes its ability to offer HD quality, and fans say its technology could enable entirely new interactive experiences. A sports fan, for example, could choose to view a game from a variety of camera angles. In the years ahead, TV watchers might be able to call up various panels on their big screen—maybe the Super Bowl taking up most of the screen with an ESPN.com feed and a video chat with a friend on the right. "If the Internet is to become a mainstream distribution vehicle for video, I think [BitGravity] will be a major player," says Blake Kerkorian, CEO of SlingMedia, which makes devices that send TV shows to laptops and other devices.

Israeli startup Arootz is taking yet another approach, blasting the most popular shows and video clips to TiVo-like storage devices in customer homes using Internet multicasting (BusinessWeek.com, 6/27/07). Distributing content in advance—and during off-hours—promises to lessen the burden on networks during peak times.

New Respect for Peer-to-Peer Technology

Another surprising entrant may play an even more crucial role in easing the video traffic jam: peer-to-peer technology. Until now, P2P has been despised by the music and film industries, because it's often used to share pirated tunes and flicks for free. And broadband providers have demonized P2P as a virulent parasite that commandeers more than half of their bandwidth.

Rather than deliver clips from a central server, P2P slices the video into tiny chunks that live on millions of users' PCs. Whenever one user requests the clip, it's reconstructed and delivered from points all over the world. Last year, to prevent such usage from slowing its customers' connections, Comcast decided to throttle back traffic from a P2P program called BitTorrent, sparking howls of protest and government inquiries.

Now, some major forces are rethinking this antagonistic view of P2P. Verizon helped formed a group called P4P to collaborate with its former rivals, and the initial results look promising. Verizon thinks it can boost download speeds by about 60% if its customers' computers, rather than searching all over the globe for bits of a video file, are directed to limit the search to one another. "This is just an example of what can happen when the carriers work with us," says Gilles Bianrosa, CEO of P2P company Vuze.

No doubt, consumers will suffer plenty of frustrations as Net video goes mainstream. "Every time we reach a new frontier—a million simultaneous users, or 5 million, or 15 million—you're going to see glitches," says Mike Gordon, chief strategy officer of Limelight. But, he adds, "They'll get fixed, and we'll move on. We've got to."

Burrows is a senior writer for BusinessWeek, based in Silicon Valley .