Here’s a piece of earth-shaking news from the I told you so department:
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – New Internet TV services such as Joost and YouTube may bring the global network to its knees, Internet companies said on Wednesday, adding they are already investing heavily just to keep data flowing.
Google, which acquired online video sharing site YouTube last year, said the Internet was not designed for TV.
It even issued a warning to companies that think they can start distributing mainstream TV shows and movies on a global scale at broadcast quality over the public Internet.
“The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect,” Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.
Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows.
Duh. Regularly scheduled broadcast TV is fine for the Internet because we have a cute trick called multicast that allows many people to get a single stream, but the proliferation of any time, any show services like YouTube will bring the net to its knees. And that, boys and girls, is why you want Net Neutrality to die in the cradle.
The Internet, you see, is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes each of which has a limited capacity. And once they’re full, they’re full. And you have to wait. Ted Stevens was right all along, and it’s about time that Google got around to noticing.
Linklove Mark Goldberg.
UPDATE: AT&T is learning the same lesson the hard way.