[Foundation-l] We should permit Flash video playback

[Erik Moeller]

On 7/20/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The basic problem with this is that, in my experience and according to
> reports I have read, IA is slow. They're happy to host any content and
> they are actively working to get more content on board -- this is the
> message we got from Brewster Kayle at Wikimania 2006. But they make no
> guarantees about quality of service. Wikimedia has more outgoing bandwidth
> and a much higher request rate than IA, and we're well positioned to scale
> that up. IA has far more storage space than we do, but it doesn't cost us
> much to add a few TB, which is all we'll need in the near term.

Here are some more numbers from Brewster:

> We currently have 2.5Gbit/sec of outbound bandwidth and we use all of it
> it a lot of the time.
> We have about 2000TB of spinning storage on 1500 machines.   We are good
> at adding space, but I dont think that is your issue.
> We are adding of bandwidth bringing us to:
>  6Gb/sec in the next 90 days (based on a federal grant, and a extra
> gigabit deal), and with all likelyhood
>  12Gb/sec by the end of 2008.

So the 10 GBit/s seems to have been based on a projection, but they
also seem well poised to scale to meet any needs we may have.

The best way to start a relationship, IMHO, would be to support an
embeddable player for all the content the Internet Archive currently
hosts which is compatible with our licensing policy. That would
require transcoding those collections to Theora in addition to the
currently supported formats.

If the user experience with those initial videos is good, I really can
see no convincing reason why we would want to take the load of scaling
up to terabytes of video content on our own. That seems to be a
classic case of "not invented here" syndrome - the Archive is
increasingly acting as a kind of non-profit hosting service, and if
they can serve our needs in the particular area of video, for free, it
seems irresponsible to ask our readers for donations instead, if
there's no real added value.

As non-profits, we're not in a competitive space, but a cooperative
one, and we should make use of that whenever we can.
-- 
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik

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