Brian's Brain

As the title of this blog post suggests, I've been doing some more experimentation with broadband movie distribution in recent weeks. But before I dive down into the details, I'll begin by elaborating on a comment made in a recent interview I conducted. As I pointed out there, I attended an interesting workshop on 'Discs Versus Downloads' at the early October Audio Engineering Society Conference in San Francisco. Befitting the conference focus, the workshop focused specifically on high-resolution audio distribution over the Internet versus on blue laser optical discs (what happened to DualDisc, DVD-Audio and SACD, by the way?). But the points made by one of the presenters, Microsoft's Sudheer Sirivara, also apply (after some size extrapolation) to an audio-plus-video presentation.

Sirivara calculated that a 3 minute long, 24-bit, 96 kHz, 5.1 channel audio 'payload', uncompressed, would be 311 MBytes in size. Lossless-compressed, it would on average shrink to around 150 MBytes in size; a two-channel version would be 50 MBytes. I suspect that lossy compression scenarios weren't covered because AES is a conference populated with audiophiles ;-) That 150 MByte payload would take roughly 15 minutes to download over a 1.5 Mbps broadband pipe (5 minutes for the 50 MByte version).

How about future trends? FTTH (Fiber To The Home) services are increasing in popularity and touting 15-20 Mbps downstream speeds, translating to much more palatable ~1 minute download times for that same 5.1-channel high resolution audio file. And according to Sirivara, bandwidth costs are, or will soon be, on the order of $0.20 per GByte, translating to 2-3 cents per song. Contrast that that with Blu-ray and HD DVD duplication costs, estimated at $1-2 per disc in high volumes, plus requisite distribution and warehousing costs.

Next, consider that broadband bandwidth is evolving ever-upward; DSL providers, for example, are talking about 100 Mbps and higher speeds in the not-too-distant future (Ars Technica, Om Malik and Slashdot chime in). And, for within-the-home distribution, we all know what sort of (inflated) speeds the 802.11n folks are promising; HomePNA is now chiming in with 320 Mbps promises (Ars Technica and Slashdot), while more conventional high-end Ethernet wiring is at 10 Gbps today (go Purdue!), with a path to 100 Gbps (Ars Technica and Slashdot again).

Now let's translate this theoretical stuff down to today's reality at Chez Dipert. As review, I'm fed by a solid 1.2 Mbps downstream DSL pipe (300+ kbps upstream), with a 100% Gigabit Ethernet connection from the router in my office (and therefore, anything wired LAN-connected in my office) to the Xbox 360 in my living room. The Xbox 360, however, contains a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet transceiver. Also, before proceeding, check out my CinemaNow writeup from late September.

As I indicated in a previous post, I test-drove the Xbox Video Marketplace the morning it launched, on Wednesday, November 22^nd. I started my download at 8AM PST, the total payload was 6.1 GBytes....and it completed 2.5 days later. I kid you not. Granted, 8 hours of that time it was disconnected from the server; I'd seen an 'unable to download' message pop up late Thursday night and assumed it'd re-attempt...I was wrong, and had to manually resume the download the next morning. But still....52 hours to download a 6.1 GByte file?

Do the math and you'll see that this translates to an average download bitrate of around 260 kbps, so my DSL pipe wasn't the bottleneck. And indeed, it seems that Microsoft under-estimated the interest in its service (a good thing, at least in the long term, if you think about it). In Microsoft's defense, I will note that speeds ramped up noticeably on Friday, judging from the pace of the percent-completed bar graph I kept staring at with disbelief (and probably indicative of a bunch of Microsoft IT folks pulled away from their day-after-Thanksgiving leftovers). And as you'll soon read, within a few days the Microsoft side of the equation was solid.

Continued with 'The Xbox Video Marketplace: A Compelling Distribution Scheme?'....

*I didn't think it was a very good movie, either