The real, objective scenario for IPTV

Local cable TV system has 100,000 paying customers. Their any-time-of-the-day pay-per-view movie department must be able to handle up to 100,000 requests for a single movie at once.
They need a 10,000-transaction-per-second database machine in their garage and an unbelievably wide driveway connecting them to the superhighway just to handle Friday night.

Idea number one is to boost contemporary database machines from 1,000 tps to 10,000 tps. To solve this annoying little problem, we need a tenfold increase in transaction processing. This should keep the database machine vendors busy for at least a decade. Now, suppose each of the 100,000 customers orders the standard 2.4-Mbps service. The 1-gigabit superhighway starts to look like the Ventura Freeway at rush hour. Idea number two is for cable TV companies to buy a telephone company because telephone companies are the only data truckers in business today with sufficient switching capacity.

Scenario 2. The superhighway is so much fun that 100 million people get on it every night to play interactive games.
They not only send/receive 2.4 Mbits of data each second, but they also do some actual computing. For example, they might play against an expert system, or they might exercise a best-selling 500-variable world-economic model while waiting for the microwave to defrost dinner: simple stuff like that.
Suppose each player needs 100 Mflops of raw compute power. That adds up to a potential of 10 billion Mflops of compute power! So let's convert Rhode Island into a massively parallel processor with silicon circuits etched on every square acre.
Alternately, we could use up the idle cycles on all those unused Apple Newtons
connected to each other by wireless networks. RISC or not, future computer architects have job security.
Scenario 3. The renaissance era of super libraries arrives.
We no longer have to lower our blood pressure by biking to the local library because everything we ever wanted to know is just a keyboard and telephone (cable) away.
In fact, 2.4 Mbits of raw data is streaming past our doorway each second. If only we could convert this raw data into information.

Idea number one is to create a whole new industry of knowledge workers who filter raw data and convert it into information. This reduces the flow rate to a few thousand facts per second. Idea number two is to create the twenty-first-century electronic publishing industry. Packaging a few thousand facts per second into meaningful amusement for the Simpson family should keep all of us busy for a few decades. And creating entirely new industries stimulates the economy.


The data superhighway is only the tip of the integrated circuit.
Sure,computers need more I/O capability, but they also need more storage, more processing power, and more connectivity. Instead of solving one problem, the superhighway may well create so many technical challenges that the skills of Computer's readers will remain in great demand until the year 2094!


Liberally taken by Ted Lewis.