Online Video Endangers Broadcasting’s Existence, Shapes Broadband Architecture, Say Executives of Net Majors
SEASIDE, Calif. -- The surge in online video puts in question the survival of conventional broadcasting beyond the next few years, imposes new requirements on the structure of broadband networks, and will spur demand for faster access, executives of Google and Cisco Systems said Friday. “We're just seeing a big change in the way video is consumed,” moving from traditional TV to the Web, said Larry Alder, the business operations principal of Google Broadband.
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"I just don’t know” whether broadcast networks are “going to hold up to the test of the next 10 years,” Alder said at the Next Gen Broadband conference at California State University, Monterey Bay. On-demand and unicast consumption of video will boom the next few years, he said. And to provide online video on large-screen TVs the resolution that consumers have become accustomed to, they will seek higher home broadband speeds, Alder said.
Google’s “YouTube is the number one video source” online, said Bob Friday, the director of strategic initiatives at Cisco’s wireless networking unit. “Netflix is right behind.” Now anybody, “including Charlie Sheen, can become your own broadcast station,” he said.
Video traffic has become much more symmetrical than it used to be, with the flood of users posting pieces to sites such as Facebook, Friday said. Network operators have had to adopt a variety of technologies to adapt, he said. And universities can get carriers to provide them on-campus wireless facilities at no charge to help deal with the data load led by video, Friday said.
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Google is catching heat from localities that applied for the company to build them broadband networks under its Fiber for Communities program, an executive overseeing the effort said. Marketing Director John Paul of Spiral Internet, an ISP that wrote the program application of rural Nevada County, Calif., complained that residents are bombarding him with questions about where the effort stands. He can’t tell them anything, because all he has heard from Google was a December email saying it wasn’t ready to choose any locations, Paul said. “That’s something we could do better on,” Larry Alder, the business operations principal of Google Broadband, acknowledged. He added, “We've heard that before and the intention is to share as much” information as reasonable with applicant communities. Processing of the 1,100 applications it received “took a while to get going,” partly because the company had to hire people to handle the load and then get the organization up to speed, Alder said. Of the outlook, he would say only that Google will announce “very soon” where it will build.
Video captioning is a tool for reaching U.S. residents who don’t speak English and helping them become literate in the language, said Director Arlene Krebs of the Wireless Education & Technology Center at California State University, Monterey Bay, which organized the conference. “Closed captioning is no longer a service for hearing-impaired” alone, she said. “Language fluency increases” when non-English speakers can read material that they're hearing at the same time, Krebs said. A leading service provider, Caption Colorado, has pushed out beyond broadcasting onto the Web with programming such as searchable college lectures and corporate earnings announcements and is working on mobile offerings, said Vice President Jim Barker. The company wants to help university and other customers take advantage, for the benefit of broader audiences, of spending they've done for accessibility for people with impaired hearing.