This is the second in a series of columns about interesting new technologies, in this case JavaScript video.
Three quarters of the bits being schlepped over the internet today are video bits, so video standards are more important than ever. To accommodate this huge load of video data we’ve developed compression technologies, special protocols like the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), we’ve pushed data to the edge of the network with Content Distribution Networks (originally Akamai but now many others). All these Internet video technologies are in transition, too, with H.264 and HTML5 video in the ascendence while stalwarts like RealVideo and even Flash Video appear to be in decline. The latter is most significant because Adobe’s Flash has been — thanks to YouTube — […]
The Intertubes are alight this week with old news — that Netflix is the largest user of U.S. Internet bandwidth. Most stories cite a Sandvine report I won’t link to because you’d have to subscribe and I like you too much for that. Better still, look at the very interesting graphic above, courtesy of Arbor Networks. This chart has been floating around the net for a couple of months and shows the result of an Arbor study of several U.S. ISPs illustrating how we Americans spend our Internet bandwidth. There are three lessons I think we can learn from this chart: 1) that BitTorrent is no longer (or perhaps never was) the threat were were […]