This is happening on college campuses across the country. If you haven't taken a look at napster, you really should. At any given time, up to 2,000 folks are logged on to it and their computers act as mini-servers, so that their compressed music files can be shared. You can log on and search for any type of music you want, find it, and download the files to your computer. The folks making those demands are doing so either because they do not understand the technology, or they want to promote the Wall Street impression that streaming video is just around the corner.
Reality is quite different.
Even with advances in compression, streaming video of any reasonable quality uses 30 to 50 times more bandwidth than streaming audio. And streaming audio when used by only 2,000 folks at a time is already crashing broadband systems. There is no question that compression technology will continue to improve. And even if it did, quality video over the Web is still a long way away. Sounds like a newfangled way of describing a cable system to me.