Like regular contributor Davey Winder, I have my hobby-horse subjects. Every so often he writes about his dislike for the slow evolution of hacking from industry-insider compliment to mass-media warning label. For me, 2021 was the year streaming took a turn for the worse.
From the outset, it was something of a fake jargon term, loosely covering all delivery of media (sound as well as video) without an initial download to local storage. Mostly, people would throw the term around when a sporting event, Royal wedding/birth/defenestration, or record-breaking volcanic eruption spiked interest in unfolding events. Streaming was a sign you were on the leading edge of the home multimedia revolution.
Then, things started to get a lot more complicated. Both Facebook and YouTube took the video captured by their phone apps and beamed it onto a web page with potentially millions of viewers, either live or on-demand. This concept has been curiously slow to take off, and seemed to have many fans in the upper reaches of the IT product design business, with almost zero support down in the more variably connected lives of everyday consumers. Too much faff; kills the battery; need to change your phone twice a year to keep up with the software, they said.
Protesters use Facebook Live to gain both attention and new followers to their cause
Personally, I have a valid interest in this game because my partner has been a habitual visitor to both Parliament Square, and Speakers Corner, as part of her permitted exercise circuit during COVID-19. It turns out shes pretty good at talking to the various tribes inclined to turn up in those locations, no matter their affiliations or, in my view, how crazy some of them might be. This was all very well until I was shown a YouTube video: of course, it shows Sandra in the midst of a lot of chaps, almost all of whom are holding smartphones.
My concern is, if something goes amiss in this vast focus of the worlds protests, how do I guarantee staying in touch? Her new mates will instantly say Telegram, but to my mind, watching that video, the main obstacle to asking what time tea wouldnt be the government snooping on the data packets; its all those guys connected live to YouTube or wherever, uploading around a MB a second of streamed video. Not forgetting all their buddies who watch, rather than stream, in the crowd. Telegram wont do me any good in a small area occupied by 10,000 people all trying to update their social media, no matter how unbreakable its encryption. Encrypted or not, secret or not, worthy or not all data packets look the same and get an equal shake when the bandwidth metre is on 100%.
The key problem here is contention. Almost everybody forgets, when benchmarking their internet speeds and crowing about 5G signals, that theyre not making a single hop over-the-air instant connection. No matter how fast the radio signal portion of the link might look on your benchmarking software of choice, it will be connected to a backhaul: a piece of fibre with often substantially less capacity than the radio side of the cellular connection. Remember, quite a lot of the earlier backhauls from the days before 2G or 3G were even contemplated, were made over ISDN copper circuits. Thats an absolute maximum of 128Kbits/sec per cell tower.
Yet, nobody noticed. People like me, whose lives are run by an influx of messages, might have occasionally spotted the odd delay, but these were in the order of a few seconds and, rarely, several hours. People dont think about how this performance is achieved and what it means for them. In the case of the modern-day protest march in central London, led by the Pied-Piper-like figure of Piers Corbyn, contention hardly does the technology justice. Corbyns favourite protest trick is literally blowing fire: when he spits out a ten-foot fireball, people nearby do two things. One, they step smartly back, and two, they take a picture, or stream a video. While they do that, the local infrastructure gives each phone a piece of the actual underlying bandwidth, divided up between all the in-range users. Tens of thousands of them, sometimes.
Firebrand Piers Corbyn knows how to ignite the phones of passers-by
Streaming is probably the most profligate bandwidth consumer of the modern era, and worse than we dared to imagine because the whole vlogger/streamer culture is itself controversial. Streaming brings with it a certain guarantee of validity: no editing, no picking and choosing, just the rawness of an uninterrupted feed. This appeals to those with a slightly paranoid outlook, as viewers and the range of protests in central London that attract streaming vlogger coverage are also right from the modern conspiracy theory playbook. In fact, theyre so driven by paranoia that the fossil copies left behind of their live stream sessions get deleted from common social media platforms within hours of them finishing whether by the site managers, trying to kowtow to government public order requirements, or by the originators, convinced that the live faithful are their only true friends, it matters not. The evidence self-disappears.
Which, for techies beleaguered by over-adventurous partners, really doesnt help me figure out the best solution to our ongoing need to communicate. I wouldnt mind something like Telegram, and yet not quite so politicised: something that lets me run a message window on my PC, which tells me the round-trip delay (if any) for each of my contacts, and optionally has links from there to the bit of Google that shows you their location and journey history, if theyve turned that stuff on.
I remember an improbable Scottish business unit of Telefnica, the Spanish phone company, demonstrating something quite like but not exactly the same as this: the bandwidth requirement for such a thing is apparently pretty low, though I expect the battery life might not be a big winner. Id like to see how those functions would work on a modern phone like the Nokia X20, which amazed me with its stamina doing sat nav duty before Christmas, for instance. As for our need to stay in touch, we have found that short SMS messages are still the most predictable platform in a big meeting or event.
I talked over the whole streaming thing with a senior colleague, and he was surprisingly negative on the subject. Give it a few months and everyone will be doing it, he said. I didnt see why he was right for some time after that, when strange twists of fate left me with a small bucket of 5G-capable phones. After only a few weeks of not very diligent fiddling, I see his point one of those major benefits to the long delays produced by lockdown and by truck driver shortages is that the phone makers have been sitting back and thinking carefully about what features they can present, and what software they can wait to be written before releasing their new models.
Youve been streamed: will we all be doing this in a few years time?
With at least a years delay in all manner of sectors from COVID-19 or from simply trying to restart after the pandemic, there has been lots of free developer time to address the more difficult and time-consuming features. Suddenly, in 2022, even the cheapest 5G phones have both the horsepower and the code to support much more compute and communication-intense functions. Barriers to being live online were a big part of the reason why doing this was only of interest to to be polite about it fanatical types. With these actual new-generation devices in the hands of practically everybody, the more contentious and fame-hungry vloggers are likely to disappear behind the sheer volume of more mainstream interests and past-times.
Accelerate your business with hybrid cloud
Tap into benefits of both cloud and on-premise
Unified endpoint management solutions 2021-22
Analysing the UEM landscape
The Total Economic Impact of IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Cost savings and business benefits enabled by storage built with IBMSpectrum Virtualize
The COO's pocket guide to enterprise-wide intelligent automation
Automating more cross-enterprise and expert work for a better value stream for customers
See the rest here:
Live streaming is pushing IT infrastructure to its absolute limits - IT PRO
- What You Need to Know About the New SAG-AFTRA Agreement ... - Casting Networks - November 24th, 2023 [November 24th, 2023]
- Premiership Rugby Highlights Show | Be on TV - ITVX - November 24th, 2023 [November 24th, 2023]
- Elon Musks Neuralink wants to merge your brain with AI at what ... - Vox.com - October 20th, 2023 [October 20th, 2023]
- The World's Job During the War on Hamas: Save the Space For Peace - TIME - October 20th, 2023 [October 20th, 2023]
- Brooklyn Beckham hits back at haters who mock his online cooking videos - Yahoo News UK - October 20th, 2023 [October 20th, 2023]
- Secret to immortality could be just a decade away as scientists predict when well learn to live forever... - The US Sun - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- Roblox Introduces Heads and Bodies to the UGC Program - Game Is Hard - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- Bigger Th*t Than Cardi B: Amidst Conor McGregor's Friend's Feud ... - The Sportsrush - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- Sofia Richie Says Royal Weddings Inspired Her Nuptials - Brides - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- How Many Times a Day to Post to BeReal a Day - Alphr - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- Usage of dark web for uploading sensitive defence information is a ... - LawBeat - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- What Should You Look for in your WiFi Plan? - My Everyday Tech - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- The Pros and Cons of Using No-Code Websites as a Blogger - MUO - MakeUseOf - August 18th, 2023 [August 18th, 2023]
- The Future Is Now: Wrestling with Ethics, Policy and Brain-Computer ... - NC State News - May 2nd, 2023 [May 2nd, 2023]
- How to Share Images Online Easily With Pasteboard - Dignited - May 2nd, 2023 [May 2nd, 2023]
- The Acid Test, April 2023 - bandcamp.com - May 2nd, 2023 [May 2nd, 2023]
- Top 9 Generative AI Applications and Tools - eWeek - May 2nd, 2023 [May 2nd, 2023]
- Top 50 Most Viewed U.S. YouTube Channels Week Of 04/30/2023 - Tubefilter - May 2nd, 2023 [May 2nd, 2023]
- PPC Automation: When & How To Use It - Search Engine Journal - May 2nd, 2023 [May 2nd, 2023]
- Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines Yoast - December 16th, 2022 [December 16th, 2022]
- All That Is In The Heavens [Part 14]: Bionic Basim - MuslimMatters - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- Mill Creek Leverages QR Codes To Help People Store Their Loved One's Messages as Forever Cherishable Memories - Digital Journal - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- In their own words: County Commissioner candidates Randy George and Steve Skinner on why each should be considered for the open District 3... - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- Get ready now for the 2022 Great Southern BioBlitz! - Cosmos - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- ILUMINATIVE Is Reviving the Modern Genre Of Hip-Hop/Rock & Nu-Metal with the Latest Album, 'Endangered' - Daily Music Roll - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- Enter the Cambridge Independents Photography Awards 2022 - and win great prizes - Cambridge Independent - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- Coros Vertix 2 review the battery life of this smartwatch is insane - CyclingWeekly - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- WTF Are POAPs? The Intriguing Power of Proof of Attendance Protocol - nft now - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- Former NRL star Finch fighting to avoid jail amid fears hell be targeted by hardened criminals - Fox Sports - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- Muni Long's long and winding road to R&B stardom - Los Angeles Times - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- She-Hulk Recap: Episode 9 | Jen Breaks the MCU - United By Pop - October 19th, 2022 [October 19th, 2022]
- People with dark personality type desire enhancing their brains with future tech, new study reveals... - The US Sun - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- Emma Chamberlain has opened up the doors of her new home and I havent been able to think of anything else since - image.ie - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- 'Don't believe everything you read': The story of The Onion - Bennington Banner - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- DJ Ace - Peace of Mind Vol 39 (Saxophone Edition Slow Jam Mix ... - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- Longtermism Movement Misses the Importance of War - Scientific American - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- Ten warning signs that your phone is spying on you and tips on removing spyware - Scottish Daily Express - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- JNU Admission 2022: Registration starts for UG admission on the basis of CUET in JNU, fill your form from this link - News Day Express - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- RTI reply: 42 cars in CM Bhagwant Mann convoy, opposition says 'badlav or waste of money' - The Indian Express - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- 10 best One Direction rock covers, from the 1975 to Wolf Alice - Alternative Press - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- How to use GPX maps and trackback on the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro Route tile - Android Central - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- CHITCHAT OVER COFFEE: Give the Heart the space it needs - Manila Bulletin - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- How technology will bridge the gap for the next million - Times of India - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- now allows you to upload your photos and edit them - Gearrice - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- 2023 Honda CR-V First Drive Review: The Once And Future King? - Motor1 - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- Pantheon Review: 2022's Wildest Tech Thriller Is a Cartoon | Time - TIME - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Worth Watching: Lord of the Rings Prequel, Uploading Gets Serious in Pantheon, NASCAR Race for the Championship - Channel3000.com - WISC-TV3 - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- The super-rich preppers planning to save themselves from the apocalypse - The Guardian - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- 8 Anime Outros Too Good to Skip - Geek Girl Authority - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- From social media to Pollywood, singer Noor Chahal says originality is her secret to success - The Indian Express - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Behind the music - Ratios - RTE.ie - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- According To Believers, 7% Of Us Will Find Code 0010110 And Exit The Matrix On August 27 - YourTango - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- Elon Musk confirms he already uploaded his brain to a cloud, he spoke to himself - Marca - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- Whatever Happened to the Transhumanists? - Gizmodo Australia - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- TREASURES OF THE TRI-STATE 2022 - 97.3 the Rock - Radio Dubuque - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- India versus West Indies second T20 highlights: Fancode yesterday match 2nd T20 highlights where to watch - The Sportsrush - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- Edinburgh internet troll guilty of sending vile online messages to politicians - Edinburgh Live - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- The PhotoStick Reviews (PhotoStick For PC) - Does This Device Really Worth Buying? Must Read This Before You Buy! - Outlook India - August 2nd, 2022 [August 2nd, 2022]
- How Close Are We to Uploading Your Mind? - How-To Geek - July 23rd, 2022 [July 23rd, 2022]
- Ranveer Allahbadia: Of collaborations and making Reels - Hindustan Times - July 23rd, 2022 [July 23rd, 2022]
- Jasmine TXO: The key to cracking TikTok - Ragtrader - July 23rd, 2022 [July 23rd, 2022]
- You can also earn big money sitting at home from YouTube or Instagram, know how? (How to Earn Money From YouTube And Instagram?) - News Day Express - July 23rd, 2022 [July 23rd, 2022]
- What the POTS shutdown will mean for faxing in the healthcare industry - Healthcare Dive - July 23rd, 2022 [July 23rd, 2022]
- Back Issues: Connecting with the past via historical objects - Stuff - July 23rd, 2022 [July 23rd, 2022]
- Hidden MrBeast Video Sees the Popular Millionaire Put Over $50,000 on the Line for His Fans - EssentiallySports - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Some of the internet's most homoerotic content is on The History Channel's YouTube? - Queerty - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- A Twitter test will remind you to add alt text to images - TechCrunch - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Beyonc's 7th Studio Album Renaissance is About Release on The 29th of July - Daily Music Roll - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Repairing an old thing is a small act of defiance against disposable culture - The Irish Times - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Warzone players slam the dumbest Perk in the history of CoD - CharlieINTEL.com - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Tatsuki Fujimotos Just Listen To This Song Is A Lesson In Love And Buddhism - DualShockers - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Required Documents - School and Student Services by Community Brands - July 3rd, 2022 [July 3rd, 2022]
- Dr. Strange: Can the Multiverse Really Work as a Plot Device? - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence - July 3rd, 2022 [July 3rd, 2022]
- Sophia Mirzas daughters say living with father happily - The News International - July 3rd, 2022 [July 3rd, 2022]
- Warning for MILLIONS of iPhone users before going on holiday this year... - The US Sun - July 3rd, 2022 [July 3rd, 2022]
- Interview: The Vamps Celebrate 10 Years At The Top! - CelebMix - July 3rd, 2022 [July 3rd, 2022]
- The powerful lesson I learned watching my father die - Sydney Morning Herald - July 3rd, 2022 [July 3rd, 2022]
- How to Sign Up for Amazon Primes Free Trialand Save Big Ahead of Prime Day in 2022 - Yahoo Life - July 3rd, 2022 [July 3rd, 2022]
- Firoz Hasan of Free Motion stands by flood affected Sylhet and Sunamganj - The Daily Star - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]
- Almost Quote the Movie Serena Williams Fangirls Over Iron Man as She Dons Similar Pair of Glasses Ahead of Her Wimbledon Championships 2022 Campaign... - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]