Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I have cable is BECAUSE of ESPN. Live sports is basically the primary value proposition of cable. Every other type of content out there is suitable for internet services, but having 20,000,000 TCP connections simultaneously streaming the Clemson vs Alabama title game vs 20,000,000 people tuning into a single broadcast is just a recipe for problems.

ESPN is partially a victim of it's own success as well. They do such a great job with online content that where you used to have to tune into Sportscenter, glued to the TV waiting to catch YOUR teams highlights now you can just hop online and catch all of them...immediately.

I remember in college having a roommate who was such a big UNC fan that he bought a VCR just so that he could tape record Sportscenter and rewatch Vince Young highlights.

View on HN

but having 20,000,000 TCP connections simultaneously streaming the Clemson vs Alabama title game vs 20,000,000 people tuning into a single broadcast is just a recipe for problems.

I'd beg to differ. The League of Legends eSports 2016 World Championship had 43 million unique viewers, 14.7 million concurrent. It is possible some viewers were from a cable TV in Korea, but it is unlikely to be a significant chunk of those figures.

The broadcast on Twitch.tv was also of much higher quality (1080p60) than what you receive from any cable company.

If that broadcast was delayed to you by up to say, 10 minutes...would anyone have noticed or cared? Was there any other option to tune in? Would you have been getting scoring updates via push notifications on your phone? Would you have family and friends texting you with reactions during the game?

the delay is about 30 seconds. and yes. people text and talk about esports all the time. it's the fastest growing market of entertainment for men 18-35.

I remember watching the 2006 Super Bowl at a friend's apartment. One room had the SD broadcast going and the other had an HD brodcast. We'd be watching them line-up in HD and hear cheers from the other room because they already saw the play.

There are lots of delays today between different broadcasts. Just try to follow a sporting event on twitter or a forum and you will see.

Yes to all of those things. I used to work for Riot and the level of fandom is no less than any other sport I've ever seen. I'm not personally a fan, but people definitely watch together and chat/text/tweet each other with what is happening. The community in America is smaller than NFL fans.

>If that broadcast was delayed to you by up to say, 10 minutes...would anyone have noticed or cared?

Depending on the significance of the game in question, a delay of even a few seconds can be noticeable and annoying, because one of my friends on GroupMe is going to make a comment about an important goal the instant it happens.

I don't think I'd really care. There are often times where I'm forced to watch VODs of these matches due to the difference in time zones.

I don't converse with anyone about the games. It's just me and my cats. I also greatly despise push notifications to my phone, with the exception of email.

But, I have a feeling I'm an edge case scenario.

Though I agree a service could definitely come about to handle millions of concurrent viewers (I wouldn't be surprised if Youtube could/almost could handle it), I just want to point out those 14.7 million concurrent viewers were across all services. So not one service handling it all. Twitch, Youtube, Korea's Twitch (forget the name), and I believe China has a few major streaming companies.

You are correct. And that's the beauty of Riot's distribution. They do not lock you into a single platform. I'm not very familiar with traditional sports, but it seems most broadcasts have very limited viewing options.

How are they doing a great job with their online content? Their website is such a dumpster fire of unhelpful design that I can't bring myself to go there anymore.

There's a 65 pixel bar at the top with scores, and a 300 x 260 pixel block with headlines. The entire rest of the page on a 1920x1080 monitor is filled with garbage, auto-playing videos, embedded tweets, or wasted space.

Watch ESPN via Android on embedded TV apps is pretty decent.

YouTube did 8M simultaneous streams back in 2012: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/oct/15/felix-baumgart...

As cable goes to an all IP model, this will be the case on your set top box, too.

Within the ISP's network, IP multicast is possible (and commonly used for live media content). Not so much over the Internet.

Wouldn't ESPN or other IPTV providers make these kinds of deals with ISPs though?

Stream one feed to the ISP and then let the ISP split it to all the interested subscribers from there?

You're describing IP-based cable TV, minus the splitting because the ISP can do multicast on their internal network which stretches to your router. Exactly the same way many ISPs do it today. This doesn't change anything about how content is sold and consumed.

My mistake if I misunderstood the post I was replying to, I thought the poster was concerned about the number of clients the source stream would need to supply.

So as opposed to ESPN needing an individual stream for every single (for example) Comcast subscriber who was watching, they send one stream to Comcast, who would then replicate it within their network to each subscriber.

I'm not a networking expert though, so maybe it's not that simple.

The thread started with brightball suggesting that ESPN and cable TV will not be killed because of Twitch, Youtube, and other streaming services, because those services cannot stream one feed to all consumers cheaply.

schnable then suggested that cable companies are switching to IP-based streaming which will have the same issue. I pointed out that it doesn't have the same issue, because multicast can be done internally to the ISP's network - though it can't be done on the wider Internet, so Twitch, Youtube, etc, still can't compete.

It's not exactly "replicating it within their network" - i.e. there's not individual connections to every single endpoint. That would quickly overload the networking equipment for no reason - you'd be sending thousands of duplicate packets, just to different endpoints. This would have no benefit over streaming from Twitch, Youtube, etc.

Instead, you have one source (which might receive its stream over satellite, unicast IP over the internet, whatever else) within the ISP's network which sends a multicast packet to its router, which then automatically duplicates it and send it to all the routers it's connected to, which does the same, and so on and so forth. This is similar behaviour to existing cable infrastructure - each packet only hits each router once.

Some small cable ISPs, and apparently maybe AT&T, do this today quite happily.

Basically, we're agreeing, but you don't seem to think we are because of the details?

I never once thought we disagreed on anything, I just thought we were discussing a topic. Thanks for the extra details!

Isn't AT&T the only major US carrier doing IPTV? The results have been pretty bad. They were using multicast for a while but scrapped it.

I'm not aware of anyone planning a large IPTV rollout; it's been dead for years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com