No Errors Or No Latency?

Apparently the Internet is almost full again.  These sorts of predictions come and go quite often, and I don't pay much attention to them.  They generally show people's lack of understanding in the TCP/IP routing system, and the amount of dark fiber which still exists from over speculation during the dot-com boom/bust.  What bugged me the most though was this piece of inaccurate information:

"Video is real-time, it needs to not have mistakes or errors. E-mail can be a little slow. You wouldn't notice if it was 11 seconds rather than 10, but you would notice that on a video."

Well that's just completely inaccurate.  Real time has nothing to do with whether it has mistakes or errors.  There is an inherent difference between latency and errors.  More importantly, real time video always has errors.  That's how you get real time streaming video!  You sacrifice quality for speed.  When video is streamed to a client computer, packets get dropped all the time.  That's why the audio is sometimes choppy, and the video sometimes has visual glitches.

In fact, the very nature of video, and the ability of the human brain, allow this to work successfully.  Your brain can fill in 1/4 of a second of missing sound using the context of the rest of the audio.  An email has to be perfect.  If a sentence is missing from the middle of an email, you will notice that.