IPTV Times
There's an excellent feature here on how YouTube built and scaled their infrastructure (thanks, Pete). The general rule seems to be to keep things simple and throw cheap hardware in to scale - oh, and use third party CDNs for the heavy loads.
Scaling http serving isn't rocket science, as this article outlines and it should be noted that progressively downloading 250Kbps short clips is a very different animal to effectively streaming scalable 2Mbps streams (something which companies such as the major CDN companies and Narrowstep are very good at).
narrowstep network technology youtube
Time For Us To Own Our Data - And Trade It
The cat and mouse game between Big Internet and Big Government over who tracks you more is probably a neverending saga.
Big Government is peeved that Big Internet is generally better at these things due to better engagement (big clue to Government about what they should do, duh! How about running networks for the communities and societies you govern!)
And the introduction of GDPR legislation in the EU has just resulted in ever more riddiculous 'I agree' popups with no real increased protection of personal privacy or data. It's just an inconvenient addition to a stupid game.
Let's reverse that.
If a browser, website or app wants my data, they have to obtain it from mybot - my own data bank. If they want it for free, they should tell me why. If they want to bid for it, so be it.
The idea that agreeing to ever longer legal documents is the basis for stealing your personal data is absurd and the EU, as ever, has totally screwed up their legislation, even with the best of …
Nations Need To Decide What To Do About Pseudonations
There is one consistent conclusion in history about the balance between massive corporations and nation states, and it is that once the imbalance starts to fall in favour of the corporates, legislation is brought in to bring them back in line. Look at The Hudson Bay, British East Indian, Dutch East Indian, what is now BP, Carnegie, Microsoft.
You may argue that financial service companies, especially JP Morgan and more recently Goldman Sachs have managed to become pseudostates - companies that are 'too big to fail', organisations that take precedent over the citizens of the countries where they operate, but they have nothing on what is happening now. They control money. Big Internet controls all data, and money is just a datum.
Of course, in controlled economies like Russia and China, there is basically no difference between companies and the State. Even France still has massive public control over their private economies. Ridiculously, French and German governments own swathes of Brit…
Video Drives Success On The Internet
I don't necessarily totally agree with the analysis of www.visualcapitalist.com, but they're a very clever bunch and this is food for thought, if nothing more.
What is interesting is that all of the major players in 2018 apart from Paypal and Wikimedia are making plays for the video market. Many of them are video first companies. And it's surprising how many of them are traditional media giants who have finally got to grip with the digital age.
We think that disrupting, in the era of Uber, AirBnB and Deliveroo is easy. But no one has seriously disrupted the TV market. YouTube and Roku have had impacts, but nothing compared to what Apple's iTunes and Spotify and Pandora have done to the music industry.
Yesterday's broadcasters are today's streamers. And notice that neither Hulu nor Netflix make the grade.
The difference between TV and everything else is rights. You can usurp rides, bedrooms and takeaways, but finding a way of usurping rights is much tougher, as…
(c) Iolo Jones,