电视的丰满理想遭遇网络带宽的骨感.docxVIP

During the World Cup games, many of us broke away from the workday to catch the emotional matches. At my office, like at many other companies large and small, we played the games’ live streams from the ESPN app on a big projector. Sure enough, the lag has been bad, as demand has swamped the servers. WatchESPN was outright crashing during theU.S.-Germany game last month. 世界杯期间，我们中的许多人都在工作日抽身去看那些令人激动的比赛。和许多大大小小的公司一样，我们公司也用大投影仪通过ESPN客户端来收看实况转播。延迟很厉害，这是一定的，原因是需求让服务器不堪重负。上个月美德大战时，ESPN的服务器干脆崩溃了。I’m guessing nobody is really surprised, given, as some might recall, the Oscars livestream crashed; HBO Go fizzled during the True Detective finale and Veronica Mars movie backers couldn’t get their free digital downloads on time. We’re used to these delays. The Internet literally can’t handle the amount of TV we watch; the idea behind “TV everywhere,” where television broadcasters provide viewers with access to online content via live or on-demand, may be impossible with our current infrastructure. 我们对这样的延迟已经习以为常。互联网确实处理不了我们观看的大量电视节目；“电视无处不在”的意思是电视台以直播或点播的方式向观众提供在线内容，但现在的基础设施可能无法实现这样的想法。Netflix NFLX -1.00% takes up about 30% of home Internet bandwidth in North America, and data from Procera estimates that anywhere from 6% to 10% of the online streaming service’s subscribers watched at least one episode of House of Cards Season 2 in its first weekend. Yet House of Cards doesn’t have nearly as many viewers as a moderately successful TV show. A total of 4.6 million people watched the premiere of USA’s Suits, for example, which for a series, is an impressive but not gargantuan hit (but one of my personal favorites!). And that’s not even broadcast, it’s cable. A highly anticipated episode of How I Met Your Mother could pull in close to 11 million viewers.Given such viewership, it seems the Internet literally cannot handle television. Because it takes up that whopping 30% of home Internet bandwidth, Netflix is disrupting traditional “peering” structures whereby two or more networks, wh