Internet Meta Grid

(note: I drafted this entry while attending the Akamai Conference in August 2008. In recent days Tom Leighton published whitepaper concerning A Perspective from the Edge of the Cloud so I thought I would complete this posting after being inspired by hearing the message I was hoping to hear and knew would come)

I need a great big httpd in the sky. I need it cheap. I am building the Media Grid. Well actually I am going to build a few grids but I need to practice on one first.

I was "in the picture" during the CEO Keynote when the Akamai anthology video was played. A highlight was shown of the Philadelphia Live8 stage outward to the city skyline and I could see my svelte figure up on the camera tower. I was also "in the picture" when a still photo was shown of me talking to Akamai engineer Vinay at the Media Technology booth in the science fair.

Akamai does 300Billion requests per day

"I am the Walrus" says the T-shirt of a guy on the streets of Boston in a video who says he won't wait any longer than 4-5 seconds for a page and has cancelled cable and watches all video online now. You are right and wrong dude. Noone will wait more than 4 seconds and most of the time you demand 1 second response time. You may be right that customers will only pay for an IP pipe and video will be satisfied with Internet devices. The Akamai CEO agrees with you. He suggests that given the speed down to the house IP TV will be competitive. Your T-shirt is mistaken though...I am the Walrus - not you.


700 Million page views on CNN in 2004
what will happen in 2008 election (what did happen...?)

10 billion online videos per month

Bill Hensler, Dynamic Media Organization, Adobe
VP of Engineering

12 Billion online videos in May 2008

You don't go to Google to search for toothpaste and snack food. How to have a Brand Conversation with consumers is challenging. 500 billion in advertising is being challenged by the web.

Consumer wants more content and best video experience (novelity is one)
Publisher wants to monetize new and existing content and make it easy to delivery to consumer (how do you make money?)

Internet offers one major change "bi-directional communication". Word!

Suspects it will take 10 more years to understand the Medium of IP TV

Advertiser wants to reach more people and interested in interactivity with the engagement.

Content type, medium and advertising are all symbiotic and shape each other.

Try to think of the general mills - how are they going to sell pop-tarts.

I am hearing Bill talk about metadata to capture the context of the audio/video and I don't know if I agree that the metadata needs to be tightly coupled to the media. I think that the interface can just be on a simple interface based on the time domain. The YouTube video annotations is an example where the metadata and the media resource are connected by ID and discretely connected by time domain.

In the video

Flash 10 h.264 mp4 files switching between video files. Demonstrated that different bit rate flv files being switched with apparently no interuption in experience.

Why would someone want to watch video off axis?

Why would someone want to have bit filters running on the client?