How Much Information?

How compressed are computer games?

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The Digital Society blog raises the question of bit rates for computer games.

The study assumed that computer games were effectively compressible to 100 Mbps which the researchers say is 8 times higher than HDTV.  But I don’t know how this number came about since computer games (even the most realistic) are not as realistic as live video due to the lack of details.  This is why even Hollywood has a hard time convincing us we’re looking at live shots instead of computer graphics.  Compression is an arbitrary number because we can choose any level of compression level we want depending on how [much] data we are willing to discard.

Actual 1920×1080 resolution gaming requires 3000 Mbps of data going from the video card to the display and at no time is it ever compressed

We spent a lot of time investigating this issue; as the post says, it has a big effect on our total byte estimate. Continue reading →

How 3.6 Zettabytes of Data Get Consumed – hmi – Gizmodo

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You probably already saw that the average American tears through 34GB of data per person per day. Here’s how the media has evolved these last few decades (sorry print), and below a way to compare your consumption with Joe Average.

This chart breaks down each activity by hours, bytes, and words for the total population, average per user, and average per American in 2008. There’s a lot to process here, but my first reaction is: that many people still watch TV in standard def?

Send an email to Brian Barrett, the author of this post, at bbarrett@gizmodo.com.

via How 3.6 Zettabytes of Data Get Consumed – hmi – Gizmodo.

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Response

What surprised me is not the amount of standard definition TV, but the large amount of live TV overall. It’s hard for me to find people who watch TV live – they either Tivo it, or watch something on the Internet, or rent DVDs with the shows they want. Unfortunately, the Nielsen TV data that we used lumps anything seen within 72 hours of original broadcast into its “live audience” report. Also, our data is for 2008; by 2010 I expect to find a lot less truly live TV. Finally, it is possible that the people I interact with are not typical. But even my computerphobic father watches recorded C-SPAN.

RB