There was a black and white fantasy TV show called "Adam Adamant Lives!" from the 60s. The BBC always wanted to re-release it but the original contracts for the show were written when no one ever considered re-runs and physical releases. The BBC didn't have rights from the original actors for anything other than the original broadcast. And one of the actors who appeared in a few episodes didn't want it to be shown again, even if they were paid, the BBC didn't want to release a box-set without all the episodes. Eventually they just waited until that actor died and they were then able to release it.
I'm lead to believe that in music there are some similar contractual issues. The rights for some artists were for radio, and physical media, but no one considered streaming or downloads because those things didn't exist. So they have to go back and tidy up the contracts to cover their asses. And it doesn't just have to be the headliner on the recording, you may need to get every performer/contributor.
What's interesting about the rise of the mega weight models is that if you look at the smaller models of the same family you see some significant improvements over time. So there's possibly some trickle down, at least some learning from techniques that is improving things across all model classes.
The other interesting one is how some of the Chinese open weights models have changed licenses that prevent some commercial exploitation of them. That's not closing their doors, but it's some steps towards ensuring their business model is protected.
Some network guys I know prefer fibre even within the rack, just because they don't want the weight and the obstructions in the rack. Apparently more than once the weight of the DACs and the bulk of the cable bundle has caused a problem with NICs.
Personally that surprised me, but I can see where they're coming from.
If you start doing bonded links with DACs or if you have a bunch of servers, the cable management situation gets ugly in a hurry, and the usual solutions like patch panels and keystones aren't applicable. Source: my basement
Admittedly I'm not buying Enterprise Grade(TM) stuff, but...
For simplicity I just use 10G LR modules everywhere. A pair of fiber transceivers is $25. Pretty sure last batch of 3M pre-terminated fibre cables I was grabbing were like $3 a piece or something. So we'll round up and call it $30.
I can get a 3M DAC for about $20.
So yeah it's cheaper, but the price isn't _that_ different. I was using DACs in quite a few places (and still am), but in general I've found it easier just using fiber. (For one, I've had a few devices that didn't get along with various DACs but worked just fine with the fibre transceivers.)
If you do it only once and would never touch it - yes.
But the time spent on digging around and occasionally debugging what and where exactly came off and no longer links (at best) or there is still link up but the are too many errors, add some SLA on top of it... No.
Video is an electronic process for capturing images and displaying them.
Before digital video there was analogue video, and analogue video was perfectly possible without digital sampling, or computers. Heck, video pre-dates silicon chips and used to be done with CRTs and valves.
As a broadcast technology architect I agree with you a whole lot on the broader technology statements.
But as a former lecturer, I also think the promise of interactivity is dependent less on the tools than on the people. Authoring interactive learning materials is difficult and while that interactivity is engaging, it's not necessarily great at getting a density of information out there.
The Socratic method is great, but that level of interactivity presumes in advance that you know what questions the student will be asking, otherwise it's just a dumb gate. Branching stories for interactivity are highly labour intensive. I suppose if you use AI you could generate a massive number of videos to cover branching learning, but that's going to still be an intensive operation, especially if you're supervising that.
Fixed Starlink is competing with fiber/DOCSIS/DSL, though. That's orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people in areas remote enough to not warrant a terrestrial cell base station (which could itself also be backhauled over much more efficient fixed satellite).
It's definitely competing in rural areas, but Starlink does suffer from physical limitations on the number of terminals per geographic area.
This is a long standing problem with cellular in urban areas. For example at Clapham Junction train station in London, which is not a terminus but a through station with 17 platforms and around 2000 trains passing each day, the local cell towers struggle to keep up with demand because so many devices pass in and out of the station every few minutes.
For Starlink D2D they can definitely gap fill for rural areas, but people are mistaken if they think Starlink can compete with the majority of the users (who aren't rural). Less than 10% of rural folk in the USA have unreliable signal. That's still an interesting market, because that's somewhere in the region of 3-6mil people. But I want to temper the hype because people seem to think LEO satellite can take over everything, when the reality is that terrestrial connectivity is always going to be better for the majority because of physics.
Someone recommended Bunny to me and I looked at it previously based on that but didn't have a use case then. But as someone who regularly recommends vendors for v.big CDN contracts I'm not impressed with their attempts to downplay things.
Yeah, I think when people are getting hundreds, or thousands of channels cheaper from some off-brand name, or from a referral from a bloke down the pub, they know what's what.
It's like buying something from the local market, those Adidas trackies are either a knock-off copy, or knocked-off stolen, but if they're 1/4 the price then they're still going to sell to someone.
The only thing I'd point out is that a security researcher found that a significant number of those grey market pirate boxes they tested had malware on them. So using them can open you up to a whole lot of risk. After all, there's no accountability for those pirates!
