Thursday, November 4, 2010

Video is Not Killing the Internet.

One thing that really stuns me is how often it gets said that video is killing the internet, with the justification for this claim being that it's now a much larger fraction of the bandwidth than "anything else".

It's a much larger bandwidth, BECAUSE IT IS LARGER.

If I spend an hour reading text on the web, it's unlikely that I will use up more than perhaps 100k of bandwidth. If I spend that same hour watching video, 100M is more like it. If something takes a thousand times more bandwidth to consume, it would have to take up a tenth of a percent of the time to be taking up exactly as much bandwidth.

If it were taking up 90% of the bandwidth, that's less than one percent of people's online activity. A projection from Wired a ways back showed web use decreasing to a "depressing" 23% Oh yeah. Video is slaughtering the text internet alright.

It's a wonder you're reading this at all.

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