Jeff Pulver Is Betting on Internet Video

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Jeff Pulver, the self-described futurist and entrepreneur who started the company that was Vonage's predecessor, is shifting his sights to Internet video, according to the Wall Street Journal: 'Mr. Pulver is creating his own Internet TV show, which he is modeling on Rocketboom, a popular Internet video-blog that broadcasts a three-minute news show daily. He is considering launching a broader Internet TV subsidiary and is weighing whether to invest in several emerging Internet video companies, though he won't name them. Someday he wants to start an Internet reality TV show.' Pulver says, 'The same DNA that disrupted the telecom industry is well on its way to totally revolutionizing the way the TV, film, and broadcast industry is going to be,' adding that he's now looking for 'the Vonage of Internet video.' And by the way, he regrets leaving the Vonage of Internet calling before it got hot: 'I blew it. I had the juice. I could have done something.'"

Re:hi

[aonaran]

Have you never heard of Pulver Communications? Free World Dialup (free VOIP service)? VON (Voice on the Net) conferences? VON Magazine? You haven't been paying much attention to VoIP have you?

Look beyond Skype, look at SIP and Asterisk. You'll start seeing his name everywhere.

Agreed! The bandwidth is not there

[Weaselmancer]

Multicast isn't implemented currently in the IPv4 internet (it's in the spec but not implemented for the most part), so he's going to have to wait for IPv6 before any streaming TV show becomes possible. Currently, all we can guarantee is unicast, and the numbers are dismal for that.

As an example, from this page [sorenson-usa.com], if you have a 2 frame per second video at 320x240, you're probably going to use 35kbps. From the master bandwidth chart [wikipedia.org], a T1 line has 1.544Mbps. Divide through, and you'll see your T1 can service about 44 customers. A T3 can service 1278.

Now look up the prices on how much a T3 will cost you. And realize that with that you're serving about 1300 customers. Scale it and you'll see why video isn't a winning game yet, money-wise.

IPv6 multicast is going to happen first before streaming video becomes financially feasable.

Re:Agreed! The bandwidth is not there

[Nuskrad]

Multicasting can be done in IPv4. The BBC are running a test streaming their TV stations via the internet using multicast. http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/ [bbc.co.uk]

Democracy Now!

[mqduck]

Democracy Now! [democracynow.org], one of the finest news programs in the world (radical and non-corporate), has been broadcasting daily audio and audio/video for download/stream - in many formats and bitrates, including FLAC and uncompressed MPEG - for years (as well as radio and even TV if you're lucky).