Fast Net News, DSL Prime, DOCSIS Report

Obama's inauguration reached a peak of 7-8M simultaneous viewers, Dan Rayburn calculates, including 3.8M at Akamai alone. Adding a few assumptions to Dan's figure, I'd estimate CDNs can currently deliver 20M streams at low bandwidth and perhaps 2M at digital cable quality. Akamai had to ration their customers' bandwidth and turn away some; the North American content networks were close to saturation, with heavy traffic in Europe and Asia as well.

"TV" can range from the 100-200K of that day's inauguration to 400K YouTube lousy to 6 megabit good HD, so there's no single figure possible

AT&T traffic is growing 25%-30%/year/customer, with a dramatic shift from p2p to YouTube and Hulu like video. Easily a third of AT&T's downstream traffic is now “web audio-video,” far more than p2p and the gap is widening rapidly.

$0.25 To Stream a DVD Quality Movie, $0.80 for HD. Those low costs in 2006 inspired the web video boom now transforming TV.

ITV UK Chairman Lew Grade is threatening to cancel news and other public service broadcasts in part of the country.  He's playing a game of chicken with OFCOM. Ed Richards has just upped the stakes,  threatening to pull ITV's licences and reminding ITV penalties could be as high as eighty million pounds. The Guardian's Maggie Brown also called Richards "toothless" and "bloodless." Government is particularly sensitive about cutting news, the Times suggests, because it "is a big deal at Westminster because this is where MPs can actually get on air."  ITV has different ideas: increasing the advertising... and product placement - getting paid to include branded items in shows."

    Grade clearly believes Richards is bluffing, and is cutting a thousand jobs already. Richards allocated ITV HD spectrum anyway. From the Guardian, the OFCOM statement:  "OFCOM would prefer that ITV retains its licence and provides a continuing public service based on the remaining value of the free spectrum it is gifted. To ensure audience demands are met, we have outlined a way forward for this in our latest PSB proposals. If ITV decides to hand back its licences that is entirely a matter for the company, and we are ready for such an eventuality."

In 2005, UPC Cable's CTO estimated his bandwidth cost at 10 cents/gigabyte. That's less than $1/per at the three gigabytes Comcast and most other U.S. carriers estimate. That's 1-3% of the $30-50 price customers pay.