Content Service Providers are a first order winner in an adoption of a Hybrid SVoD paradigm. The cost of refactoring their content delivery hardware and software infrastructure are dwarfed by the potential savings.
A concrete example is Netflix. The largest CSP, Netflix owns much of its own edge hardware. Netflix co-locates its hardware at strategic Network Exchange Points [IXP], and at large ISPs around the world. The Netflix Content Delivery Network [CDN] is known as Open Connect. It duplicates its media assets at hundreds of these Open Connect sites, lessening the burden in the Tier1 ISPs, and lessening operational latencies for its customers. Being the largest CSP, Netflix had no choice but to deploy such a large distributed infrastructure.
With this proposal, server utilization would tend to bifurcate. Some servers would predominantly attend to popular Fat-Tailed Assets with increasing implementation based on Multicast delivery. Longer tailed content would predominate on equipment holding larger asset catalogs via traditional SVoD streaming.
The transformation would be gradual and integrated with the anticipated obsolescence schedule of their hardware. This class of hardware is designed for continuous operation of about 4-5 years. Consequently, depreciation schedules on this class of data center gear is on the same order. (Nolle, 2012)
Regardless of the mix of delivery mechanisms, the Asset Storage requirements will increase for the foreseeable future. The anticipated performance boosts of Solid State Memory, along with its reduced form-factor, will likely half the required vertical rack real estate. Solid State memory will displace the increasingly quaint rotating media, accelerating the replacement cycle.
The takeaway is that any transformation that includes Multicast methods would be no more transformative than the normal technological replacement cycle, but with very significant strategic cost savings.
Hybrid VoD 