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The internet, as of 2006, was handling 10,000 petabytes.

"If the company can pull it off--and that remains a big if"

Agreed - they're just a startup, and Ireland is not exactly known as the tech center of the world. They're going to have to push this very hard if they want it to happen.

"A physicist by training, Armstrong claims the Internet can't handle movie downloads anyway. He did the math on last year's release of Shrek 3. In the first three days, 11 million copies got sold. That's 66 petabytes of data."

Assuming the same bit rate as a DVD, I'm sure. Also, a petabyte may sound like a lot - but remember this is the entire internet we are talking about, not just to a single computer.

. . . and that's where he flops. The annual bandwidth of the Internet as of 2006 was estimated to be over 10 exabytes:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120363940010084479.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Using some back of the envelope calculations, that's about 82 petabytes in three days - so the internet can actually theoretically handle it, although it would nearly saturate it. That was a year ago, though, and broadband bandwidth has increased since then.

Considering that bandwidth of broadband connections is increasing dramatically, I'd say that it's not unrealistic that we will be able to handle it easily in the very near future. As early as this year, in fact.

A physicist he may be, but a computer scientist he is not. You have to be careful about experts who stray away from their field of expertise.

"But what about piracy? "It will never be perfect, but we are going to make it as hard as we can," he said. Movies rented from the service will comply with Microsoft DRM standards."

They'll want to be very careful about the subject - after all, DRM is almost dead in the audio industry. In addition, it remains a cat and mouse game - the user's computer does, after all, need to decrypt it at some point, which requires keys, and it's just a matter of finding the keys. Or just capturing the video after it's decrypted.

Posted by: CobraA1   Posted on: 03/03/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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