Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV

GOOGLE AND CABLE FIRMS WARN OF RISKS FROM WEB TV
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Lucas van Grinsven]
New Internet TV services such as Joost and YouTube may bring the global network to its knees, Internet companies said on Wednesday, adding they are already investing heavily just to keep data flowing. Google, which acquired online video sharing site YouTube last year, said the Internet was not designed for TV. It even issued a warning to companies that think they can start distributing mainstream TV shows and movies on a global scale at broadcast quality over the public Internet. "The Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress. Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks' high-quality delivery of shows. One cable chief executive, Duco Sickinghe from Belgian operator Telenet, said it was "the best news of the day" to hear that Google could not scale for video. Research group Gartner estimates that 60 percent of the Internet traffic that is uploaded from computers is peer-to-peer traffic, mostly from consumers swapping films and TV shows through select user groups and BitTorrent. (The research found that 39% of Internet traffic is spam so just 1% of traffic was found to be "productive work.")
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