[md224]

Good point, though I'll note that streaming games, high-res video, and remote terminals are already available (at least via high-speed ethernet connections), so the "next generation" would be higher quality or wider availability rather than genuinely new forms of media.

My instinct is that there are diminishing returns past a certain point. We're certainly not there yet, but once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add.

I see it as a philosophical issue... bandwidth is for the transmission of information, and there's only so much information that a human being can receive and provide at a given moment. At some point you're running up against the maximum bandwidth of the human user.

[est31]

> once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add.

Well there is this famous quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." from 1943 and it turned out to be very wrong.

"High-definition VR content" isn't the same as "indistinguishable from reality". When movies were first introduced to theaters, with small frames per second rates, without color and without any sound on the medium itself, people were quite stunned and e.g. took cover when a the movie showed a train approaching at high speeds. Nowadays it seems primitive to us from a technological standpoint.

There is a trend that some people don't accept lossy audio encoding. Maybe one day, videos will get a same trend and people want lossless videos, in full 360 degree VR, intensity resolution beyond perceptual limits and constantly high enough angular resolution for your eyes to foveate any area of the screen and see no pixels. That's quite a huge amount of data to transmit. Add in buffering so that you can seek, etc.

As for genuinely new forms of media, I could think of some: full-body experiences with feeling of touch, smell, etc either live or recorded possibly professional in a studio or just you sharing your last vacation to venice.

Taking it further: uploading your consciousness to a body which is a large distance away, making physical travel of humans mostly obsolete: Maybe one day we can represent the brains of human individuals as data and send it with light speed around the earth and throughout space.

[vel0city]

So here's an example of "next gen" media streaming in action. I was recently at a MotoGP race. MotoGP has a streaming media app that allows for you to stream cams from your favorite racers on your mobile device in very high quality. This would be really cool to use for the many hours of racing throughout the day at the race track, but while its technically possible with current technology for me to do it the cost is prohibitive. With significantly higher throughput per tower, the cost of data should significantly be reduced, making it really cheap to have a crowd of people at the race track have a few 1080p each.

[paulmd]

On-demand streaming of identical content to hundreds of users at the same time is not an efficient use of bandwidth.

It's like Netflix versus cable television - you can push the equivalent of hundreds of 1080p streams through a broadcast cable television, but attempting to push on-demand IP packets to an equivalent number of subscribers would bog down horrifically if they even attempted to stream a single show (let alone how you have cable tuners that can tune multiple shows at once).

What you need there is something much more akin to broadcast television - either a digital OTA video broadcast (good ol' digital television), or a microcell using multicast to broadcast a stream to any interested party.

(of course your phone probably doesn't have a DTV tuner, but when a RTL-SDR dongle is like $20, you should probably be asking why your phone isn't integrating that functionality. These days they don't even have FM tuners on phones anymore... despite the fact that in virtually all cases those are already built into the cellular chipset. IP-based singlecast is not a good paradigm for a lot of the use-cases that people come up with, it's just that it's the most profitable one for carriers, so it's the only one they'll support.)

[vel0city]

In this instance its not all identical content though. In this example, each bike has three cameras, along with a dozen or so camera angles around the track. Users can pick and choose a lot of those different views and combine a hybrid view of their own personal choosing.

Of course, this could also be accomplished with DTV tuners, but there's a much higher probability of users having a 5G chipset on their phone than having a DTV tuner capable of tuning to multiple channels and an antenna.

[paulmd]

So essentially you want you want an app that lets you pick a couple multicast groups to add yourself to, and then displays them in this "hybrid view of their choosing".

It's the same as what the app is currently doing, just with multicast groups instead of singlecast. And by doing so, you reduce the network load by N/M, where N is the number of users and M is the number of streams each user runs on average.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that this probably isn't currently implemented, but that's the kind of thing we should be looking at, before we decide to screw up weather forecasting and radioastronomy so that you can see your NAAAYYSSSCARR.

Even 5G is going to get eaten up under certain types of load, so it makes much more sense to look at ways to reduce traffic, the easiest of which is broadcasting rather than singlecast.

[cjsawyer]

"...before we decide to screw up weather forecasting and radioastronomy so that you can see your NAAAYYSSSCARR."

This isn't the place for cheap comments like that.

Even if you have a point ideologically speaking we live in the real world where consumer money talks louder than forum comments. 5G is coming whether we like it or not because of people wanting to stream data for entertainment.

[mirimir]

I guess that we can revisit that if weather forecasting does become substantially less reliable. And with global climate change, maybe we'll need reliable weather forecasting. But me, I'll be dead before it gets too bad, dog willing.

[darkpuma]

When hot dogs at sports stadiums cost $10 a pop, why do you think 1080p streams would be cheap?

[Gpetrium]

It is dependent on supply/demand and business model. You could have asked the same thing when Google/Yahoo as a search engine came into play "why do you think the knowledge of millions would be widely available and relatively cheap/"free"?

[darkpuma]

The stadium has a monopoly on hot dogs and event streaming, so they can gouge you til their heart's content.

[minton]

So we up the bandwidth, something like Elon’s NueraLink.