Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and co-founder of Broadcast.com and HDnet, confirmed what I said many moons ago about Internet TV.

our telecommunications infrastructure is woefully unprepared for widespread delivery of advanced services, especially video, over the Internet. Downloading a single half hour TV show on the web consumes more bandwidth than does receiving 200 emails a day for a full year. [blogmaverick.com]

I wrote about this at great length back in January (in another forum -- I was going to repost it here but, after re-reading it, realized it was not very well written and about 1000 words too long).

The main point was that the Internet was built on the concept of best-effort delivery of packets, and packets not received are simply resent -- basically it was built for downloading and not for streaming or other real-time delivery.  Email and newsgroups -- the earliest 'interactive' applications -- were still store-and-forward systems.  The fact that the Internet supports voice and video as well as it does would probably astound the researchers that developed it.

Tags: internet, TV, IPTV