Brian's Brain

As long-time Brian's Brian readers probably already realize, I'm a strong, steady believer in the ultimate ascendance of Internet-based video delivery to homes, to the detriment of today's dominant distribution schemes. Back in January, for example, I suggested that Warner's Blu-ray blessing (and HD DVD coffin nail) was fueled by the fear that non-optical disc approaches such as the iTunes Store would garner unstoppable momentum if the format war continued much longer...as well as insinuating the long-view futility of investing in any physical format.

The same sort of logic applies to television content. Even if you're one of those rare folks who currently tunes into free, advertising-supported network broadcasts via a roof-mount antenna, the appeal of whenever-you-want (with no TiVo hassle) viewing of your favorite shows, across a diversity of both fixed-location and portable hardware platforms, is alluring in spite of the cash you'll need to spend to get it. If you're fixated on the word free, of course, there are still other ways to get your fix. And once you can snag your HBO (for example) shows from Apple, why would you want to also pay Comcast, DirectTV or Dish Network for the privilege?

Part of the motivation for my longstanding interest (and coverage) is admittedly personal in nature. My home office location isn't conducive to straightforward over-the-air terrestrial reception. And given how little television I watch, I can't fiscally justify a cable or satellite television service subscription. But, bigger picture, I'm professionally intrigued by the substantial impacts that such content delivery shifts will have on a variety of technology categories. Consider, for example, the requisite coding-and-otherwise-processing evolutions in hardware (and associated hardware) both at the broadcast and reception ends of the content provider-to-consumer chain. Consider the transformative effect that large-payload, low-latency, and high-priority video delivery will have on both WAN and LAN networks. And consider, to the degree that such content can be archived versus one-time streamed, its positive influence on a hard drive's average capacity along with other parameters (power consumption, heat dissipation, etc).

With that overview in mind, let me tell you about last night's high-def VUDU rental experiment. After watching the first two Bourne movies gratis (they're included with each VUDU subscription), I punched 'rent' on the HD version of The Bourne Ultimatum at 7:25PM last night (with nothing else consuming tangible LAN and WAN bandwidth at the time, by the way). I wasn't expecting the sort of 'instant gratification' that I'd earlier gotten with standard-def material, of course, but I anticipated I'd receive an Apple TV-ish HD result...a movie 'ready to play' after around a bit over a one hour delay, courtesy of the service's progressive download capability. My first warning that 'past results do not guarantee future performance', as a mutual fund firm might say, came when an on-screen message suggested that the movie would be ready to play in 'around four hours'. Whoa...what happened to 'approximately 2 hour delay' estimate I got during initial setup?

I'd hoped that VUDU was just being overly conservative, but when I returned to the bedroom at 9:05PM (note: 1 hour and 40 minutes after beginning the download), I realized I wasn't going to be watching my movie that night:

So why, given that I was earlier able to begin watching the HD version of The Darjeeling Limited over Apple TV after a 68-minute delay, was I unable to start viewing my VUDU rental even though I'd waited 30 minutes longer than before? A quick brainstorm uncovered four potential culprits:

1. The data flow from VUDU's server(s) (and other P2P content sources) was constricted as compared to its Apple server network competitor
2. My DSL WAN connection was running slower than before
3. Something was seriously amuck with my LAN
4. The data flow into the VUDU box was constricted as compared to its Apple TV competitor
5. The Bourne Ultimatum had a longer runtime than its Darjeeling Limited predecessor, and/or
6. VUDU's HD content is encoded with a higher per-second average bitrate than is Apple's material.

Continue reading with 'A HD VUDU Download: How Hefty Is The Payload?'...