I really liked the talk, it started sort of slow, but the second half is extremly interesting. Especially where Drew goes into detail about the protocol used by Move at ABC, Fox and other sites to deliver the content.

Listening to it I had an idea how to possibly improve it. If the client had downloaded in its offline time a set of targeted ads for this particular customer (possibly 10s clips instead of the standard 30s) it could use them to insert into the content at the time the network bandwith slows down instead of downsizing the video resolution / bitrate. Also a short advertisment at the start could be used to buffer up some content. If I knew my client is only showing me ads when the network is slow, I would be more likely to stay and watch them. Especially if it is just one or two 10s clips as opposed to ten 30s clip segment as seen on cable.

Because those ads would be preloaded, they would not compete for bandwith with real content as they so often do now. And the time showing ads could be effectively used. Of course, the 2s short clips would probably need some metadata to say where the video stream can be cleanly interrupted by ad.