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GeneralRe: Coronavirus is to affect BBC TV output. Pin
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 20:28
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 20:28 
GeneralTwo young nurses die as NHS braces for more coronavirus losses Pin
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 7:04
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 7:04 
GeneralRe: Two young nurses die as NHS braces for more coronavirus losses Pin
Nelek3-Apr-20 7:42
protectorNelek3-Apr-20 7:42 
GeneralRe: Two young nurses die as NHS braces for more coronavirus losses Pin
Daniel Pfeffer4-Apr-20 7:24
professionalDaniel Pfeffer4-Apr-20 7:24 
GeneralFree HBO, for anyone interested Pin
David O'Neil3-Apr-20 6:56
professionalDavid O'Neil3-Apr-20 6:56 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 7:07
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 7:07 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
lopatir3-Apr-20 7:36
lopatir3-Apr-20 7:36 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
kalberts3-Apr-20 9:46
kalberts3-Apr-20 9:46 
I never subscribed to any streaming service, so I ask out of curiosity / lack of knowledge:

Are streaming services of today easy to rip for downloading, so that you can transfer and save ten movies in the time it takes to play one of them? Or are they so well protected against ripping that most people do not sufficiently easy-to-use ripping tools that it has any impact? Or doesn't anyone at all care to download movies nowadays?

If this opening up cause half a million people to use the opportunity to dump the entire HBO movie base to their private disks at the maximum speed their fiber connection allows, then it would of course have a dramatic impact. And disk vendors would have golden days.

If we are talking about watch-as-it-is-being-streamed: Each person (/screen) streams only one movie at a time! Although some picture-in-picture systems allow you to simultaneously watch a second movie in parallel, but I would think that not too many make use of that option. So the worry about this HBO opening significantly increased network load would be caused by users spending significantly more time watching streamed movies, rather than other activities that are not as heavy load on the network.

My impression is that people today, especially young people, stream movies all the time. Say "video disk", or "TV broadcast", and they will start looking for moss growing on your head and mold behind your ears. Physical media and "linear media" (a rather mocking term nowadays) is something that grandparents, or rather great-grandparents, were using; it belongs in the same group as 78 rpm records.

There is no significant difference between streaming an HBO movie or a movie from some other streaming service.

Then I would say that I am quite impressed by how well the backbone network has handled the significantly increased traffic. I was prepared for a total breakdown; that certainly didn't happen. My employer last Monday evening announced a fifteen minute break in remote login services to install new hardware to support more home offices; it went smoothly through. The network provider had no problems handling it. Neither my local ISP nor other ISPs seem to have had any problems handling it.

I will not rule out that Norway is far ahead in Internet deployment - we recently had a discussion whether 100 Mbps connections could be considered "broadband connection" or not. As long as 40 years ago, the Norwegian parliament ruled that all new trunk lines should be based on optical fiber. (That was not realized: For a few more years, vendors could not provide terminating equipment, and fiber technology was in the transition from multimode to singlemode fiber, but it signals the ambition level.) For the 1994 Winter Olympics, people were pointing out that the fiber bundles laid down for communication between Lillehammer and Oslo were sufficient to take exponential traffic growth (disregarding the Olympics) for sixty years!

Also, the public broadcaster, NRK, has provided web access to all radio and TV channels for at least ten years. They have built up a distribution network with several nodes spread out over the country, so that both direct view and streaming users get the contents from a local redistributor, significantly reducing the load on long haul lines. I believe commercial broadcasters use similar distribution strategies.

So maybe Norway has a more capable backbone network than many other countries. Yet, it takes switches and routers to handle it. I cannot deny that I am impressed by how few problems we have seen.
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
Slacker0073-Apr-20 10:29
professionalSlacker0073-Apr-20 10:29 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
MarkTJohnson3-Apr-20 11:44
professionalMarkTJohnson3-Apr-20 11:44 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
kalberts3-Apr-20 13:46
kalberts3-Apr-20 13:46 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
Nelek4-Apr-20 9:38
protectorNelek4-Apr-20 9:38 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 20:07
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 20:07 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
Mycroft Holmes3-Apr-20 15:01
professionalMycroft Holmes3-Apr-20 15:01 
GeneralRe: Free HBO, for anyone interested Pin
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 20:31
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 20:31 
GeneralI told my wife... PinPopular
DRHuff3-Apr-20 6:33
DRHuff3-Apr-20 6:33 
GeneralRe: I told my wife... Pin
Greg Utas3-Apr-20 7:03
professionalGreg Utas3-Apr-20 7:03 
GeneralRe: I told my wife... Pin
lopatir3-Apr-20 7:08
lopatir3-Apr-20 7:08 
GeneralAmong others ... Pin
User 110609793-Apr-20 6:24
User 110609793-Apr-20 6:24 
GeneralRe: Among others ... Pin
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 6:32
Mark_Wallace3-Apr-20 6:32 
GeneralRe: Among others ... Pin
DRHuff3-Apr-20 6:32
DRHuff3-Apr-20 6:32 
GeneralSeaside Sentiment Pin
W Balboos, GHB3-Apr-20 5:59
W Balboos, GHB3-Apr-20 5:59 
GeneralRe: Seaside Sentiment Pin
OriginalGriff3-Apr-20 6:15
mveOriginalGriff3-Apr-20 6:15 
GeneralRe: Seaside Sentiment Pin
W Balboos, GHB3-Apr-20 6:17
W Balboos, GHB3-Apr-20 6:17 
JokeMy wife asked me to do some odd jobs. She gave me a list of 10... Pin
littleGreenDude3-Apr-20 5:41
littleGreenDude3-Apr-20 5:41 

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