It always fascinates me that we all rely on the internet for so much of what we do, as an essential service, that we all seem so incredibly complacent with the fact that the fail whale is the norm. We accept that the internet and many internet based services go down for periods of time. We complain and move on, waiting for it to come back. I also marvel at the digital people who bark TV is dead and so for that matter is the fixed line phone. But both of these technologies have something the internet doesn’t currently have, mature stability. When was the last time they showed the off-line/broken tv frame indicating a fault and the shows went off air? When was the last time you picked up the telephone and it didn’t work? But the instability of the internet is a fact of life driven by the extraordinary speed with which it grows and the fact that it becomes increasingly more difficult for ISP’s to keep up, by updating hardware while revenues teeter. TV still has the advantage that it just works. And perhaps that is why the download, store and watch model is so popular on the internet. That method is forgiving of fails, when the servers come back the download resumes.
And TV is multi-cast, meaning that one antenna can serve unlimited TV’s in its area. Yet we constantly hear stories about how the BBC iPlayer pretty much choked the internet when it launched in the UK. Internet connections and ISP’s pipes are capped bandwidth services, can only serve a set amount of data per second and for video the internet is unicast. I have been involved in multicast video trials before and even within a single ISP this can be complicated, in fact it didn’t work. The next step for an ISP is IP/TV, the real one, more on that another time.
We have some way to go. ISP’s race to keep up as more and more of us put our personal and commercial video online. But none of this should stop you moving your video content into the web space. The internet is still an incredible self publishing marketplace. Your video content can find an audience anywhere in the world, an audience you wouldn’t find on traditional television.
There are a myriad of self service video hosting options available to you and in our next post we will look at some of the more professional, business focussed sites that let you get your video content online.
3 Comments
Scott,
A very topical issue given Google Gmail service was down for several hours yesterday.
I think the average person’s perception of the Internet as a platform or service technology is that it sits half-way between a telephone and a computer.
We have very high expectations of telephones – we *always* expect a dialtone when we pick it up.
On the other hand, we have *much* lower expectations of personal computers, because we have all experienced technical failures.
The Internet seems to benefit from an averaging effect between the two.
Over time, however, out tolerance will move further up the spectrum towards the telephone end. This will require a major change in thinking around how software + hardware is meshed online.
MN
In a few more years time, when people are even more dependant on (and addicted to) being “switched on”… can you imagine the madness that a power failure would cause?
My 10 month old baby already knows how to turn up the tv/stereo, turn lights on, open the electric car windows, operate power switches and press the centre button on my phone so that the picture of her Dad comes on screen. She types on my computer keyboard, and is so much more dextrous than i ever was. The other night she dialed her Grandfather and chatted to him without me knowing. 10 months old.
Imagine what the future holds!?!?
Scoot,
You are absolutely correct, the internet still has yet to get to the maturity stage!
In regards to the fixed phone and TV.
Nothing dies it just gets outdated and integrated into something else.
IC