🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael Dillon (michael@junction.net) wrote:
: In article <3llna5$si9@kaiwan.kaiwan.com>,
: Bill Schultz <guru@kaiwan.com> wrote:
: >>(oh, and compare the amount of bandwidth used by text versus that used
: >>by video some time!)  
: >
: >YES!  A decent compressed video channel for a standard cable television feed
: >(such as appears on the 18" dishes) runs about 6Mb/s!  That drowns most
: >Internet stuff.  So, how would the Internet support video on demand?  The
: >same way it supports news now.  You have a local video on demand server
: >that gets loaded once over the net with the video signal, using TCPIP because
: >it does not have to be loaded in real-time (i.e., basically an FTP situation).  The
: >users access the video off of their local servers, just as they do news.  Its the
: >only practical solution at the present time.

I interviewed at one of the many "video on demand" startups for a software
engineering position, and during the tour of the facilities, I was shown a
demo of MPEG-II transmitting real-time video over a 9600 Modem connection.

The image quality was pretty good, but far from digital quality.  
Aliasing and artifacts were obvious if you knew what to look for, but 
it's definitely good enough for most consumers.

-- 
Stephen Mann <smann@rahul.net>