[CAnet - news] Open Source TV and Telcom

For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 4 Optical
Internet program web site at http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/list.html
-------------------------------------------

[Here is a couple of posts from Dave Farber's IPer list discussing some
interesting new trends in the open source movement.  Some excerpts -- BSA]



http://gigaom.com/2006/02/23/here-comes-open-source-telecom/


While open source software movement has ravaged the bottom lines of
companies like Sun Microsystems; networking behemoths like Cisco and Juniper
have continued to enjoy fat margins they earned even before the telecom
crash of 2000. Even today, a big portion of their IT budget goes into
networking gear. Routers, switches, firewall devices, and even VPN boxes
cost thousands of dollars.

The scramble for open source in networking comes because two primal forces
tearing the old telecom order apart. First, the Internet-based technologies
are replacing the closed legacy phone systems, thus helping the convergence
of computer and the phone systems. In old times, in order to build a
networking box, companies would design specialized chips, and run
specialized software on them to get the best performance. Now you can buy
extremely powerful processors like Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chips for
a few hundred dollars, run special networking software on them, and get
similar performance. There are nearly half-a-dozen open source projects that
capitalize on the cheap processing power.

--------------------

Following up on the idea of "Open Source Telecom" we can think about open
source TV. I saw a piece in the NYT today about a new show "Kappa Mikey"
(http://www.animationcollective.com/news/news02062006.htm) from The
Animation Collective. What makes it interesting is that it is done in Flash.
Doing animation in Flash is nothing new nor is the idea of simplified
production (as with South Park or even Clutch Cargo nearly half a century
ago).

Flash content doesn't take much network capacity because it is coded mostly
as objects. It avoids the whole the need to compress - it is a compressed
format. What is strange is rendering it as video at the head end and then
recompressing it as MPEG2 (or MPEG4) for transmission and then doing an
analog decompression. This destroys the integrity of the content (AKA
signal).

This is not just about bypass, this is about simply getting the real signal
through. It's a scenario that is far worse for the broadcasters than bypass
because it is changing the rules in a way that makes the paths they control
a liability not an asset.



Bob Frankston


-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.

-----------
[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news