The homepage of System 73 says Broadcast TV is losing viewers to streaming alternatives, and while few would doubt the statement, the problem could easily be that broadcast TV is itself turning to streaming, but add in the increasing list of sports, movie and hobby sites and the internet starts to crawl.
Enter Bill Erbey with a background in infomatics and statistics, and a $2.8 billion fortune derived from a lifetime in the mortgage business.
“Most people looked at internet congestion as a hardware problem, more routers and fibre, and the problem will go away. When we looked at it I found it interesting to find out what the protocols are. The Border Gateway protocol is probably 40 years old. It’s a group of traffic hubs, all of them centralised and not knowing what the other traffic hubs are doing. And that’s what leads to the congestion.”
System 73 brings together some familiar names from both content and technology worlds. Åse Ytreland, managing director, global media division, has worked with Disney, Fox, National Geographic and ESPN, while Chris Tooke, executive vice president, sales has been at ACS and ThinkAnalytics.
Its primary product, PolyNet, is a tree-based, peer-to-peer overlay network designed to reduce bandwidth consumption by nearly 99% and provides premium Quality of Experience.
“We set out to not only reduce the amount of traffic by going peer-to-peer in a pre-based structure. We’ve patented the ability to forecast congestion and traffic on the internet; so not only do we forecast it, but we overlay the topography on top of that, to route any potential congestion on the interest.”
Erbey’s argument is that many companies simply send out their content and hope it gets there. Over the top is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily allow you to count how many people are viewing your content or in what quality. The problem, he says, is the issue will eventually overtake the Internet.
“We can control the decision-making within the tree, conceivably you could use a device that is not even connected to the video that you want to watch and use that as a relay to you. Essentially become a virtual CDN with thousands of points of presence.”
Tooke says his sales team is seeing the greatest amount of calls from Asia, because the connectivity is not as strong as everywhere else, though in Europe the amount of content is in itself creating problems.
System 73 will be at NAB in Las Vegas and at IBC later in the year.
