The celestial jukebox. Online gaming. Streaming movies. TV on your mobile phone. The dream of having all the entertainment you want as soon as you want it, has never been so close. There's only one catch: network connectivity contention. You know it by many forms: A spinning hourglass; a "Buffering" window; a stuttering video; a glitch within a game. Though full of promise, streaming entertainment is still a long way from the seamless, instant response we've come to expect from a DVD player or a console gaming system.
Why the friction in speed? Part of it has to do with delays on the open Internet. But a surprising amount of it has to do with the technology that is embedded in our TVs, home networks and personal computers. The explosion in modern entertainment is stretching our home networking technology to its limits. Every application wants all your bandwidth at the same time and it's creating a "tragedy of the commons" right in your living room.
But technology enthusiasts rest assure, help is on the way. In this panel, leading experts on home networking and media distribution will reveal the sometimes surprising causes of streaming media glitches in the home, and technology solutions that could make buffering delays a thing of the past.
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