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Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers

Posted by Zonk on Sat Feb 25, 2006 06:24 PM
from the next-olympics-to-be-streamed dept.
Media The Internet Television Movies Music
Anonymous Coward writes "Robert X Cringely is postulating today that as bandwidth applications grow, the data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data. Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams, which is never going to impress the TV network exec used to audiences in the millions. Cringely choruses that secure P2P is the solution to delivering not only high quality video but also to audiences that scale in the millions. BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently, so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?"
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  • Change the paradigm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cos(0) (455098) <pmw+slashdot@qnan.org> on Saturday February 25 2006, @06:26PM (#14801870) Homepage
    Sure, currently 150,000 copies of data puts a large strain on the servers... what about one copy broadcast via multicast, much akin to airwaves?
    • Yep, but there has to be a serious profit motive for the network providers because they will have to do a LOT of work to get multicast working reliably across their entire network.
    • Don't you mean "go back to the old paradigm"? Isn't the whole appeal of IP based content distribution to get away from that model? Content on demand, yada yada yada?
    • Multicasting will deal with the challenge faced with distributing a single live event. However, TV networks are moving into Video On Demand as quickly as they can. They will have to probably invest in two distribution bases.

      1) Multicast for "Regularly scheduled programming"
      2) P2P for day after and future VOD distribution.
    • Then how do you control it? Its the same problem with radio. At least with radio you make the majority of profit from sponsors and advertisement so theres no need to control distribution (not to mention the fact that its relatively cheap to setup a radio station). So its 'ok' if you have no control of who hears the content. (More ears = more audience = more sponsors)

      But when you put it online (multicasting, Bittorrent, whatever) how do you tell whats your audience? You can't track them, hackers would go ins

      • You use encryption and locked-down client software/hardware like iTunes or Akimbo. (Of course, anything can be cracked, so your system only has to be more secure than DVDs.)
        • Bingo. What, exactly, is the difference between multicast on the 'net and DirecTV? Both broadcast to everyone, both are only supposed to be used by paying customers. DirecTV does it successfully, so does Dish Network. And there are satellite TV companies in other countries as well.

          So why can't they do it with Multicast?

          As for figuring out how many people are watching, another reply has it right: we don't know now, so worst case scenario, what changes there?

      • But when you put it online (multicasting, Bittorrent, whatever) how do you tell whats your audience? You can't track them, hackers would go insane and tear the tracking code out.

        I know! Imagine if television signals were broadcast over the air, to cathode ray tube based devices with little to no digital components at all, and no way for viewing data to be sent back to the broadcaster?

        Oh wait, that's the way it's worked for over 50 years. And there's a multibillion dollar ratings collection company
      • how exactly do you count the number of television watchers or radio listeners ? it's easy ... you don't ...

        the tv companies have no ide how many people are watching them, they believe the poll results that are given to them by poll companies that are in close connection with them and therefor not objective ... there are automatic machines that can be placed between the tv and the antenna, but that only measures the looking statistics of people that really have this item installed (in my country there is a
        • Radio is only high because there is demand, and the govt sees it as a free cash cow to go charging
          $0000000000000's worth so the station will have a hard time recovering the cost.

          Hardware wise its peanuts. Hell, its probably cheaper to pay $10m to make a sat and launch a sat from russia for $20m, than
          pay the local govt $80m for a damn licence. And go broadcast from space geo.

          Imagine if the govt suddenly made a 'website licence' and charged people $1000/yr. Or a streaming media licence for
          $10/gig/year or some
        • You know, there is a science called statistics. And statistics can tell you how many households you need to get a certain margin of error for your measurement. As long as the households are randomly selected (not too hard to do), it's accurate to a percent or so even with a smallish sample.

      • The iTunes store does fairly well as a centralized system, but even Apple has admitted this, their profits are virtually a joke in terms of actual cash amount.

        iTunes is not wildly profitable because the Record Companies said "give us X% or we won't give you access to our catalogues"

        Apple got their foot in the door and is laughing all the way to the bank. They could lose money on iTunes and still be laughing, all because the iPod is making a killing.

        Now, Apple has enough muscle to tell the **AA to go pound s [wordorigins.org]

    • P2P narrowcasting so that everyone can watch their favorite show any time of day _they choose_ is like telling everyone in a crowded hot tub to move to the other side simultaneously.

      p2p Broadcasting a single feed is like having everyone shift over one seat.

      you get to sit next to the jet the same amount time. But you may not get to sit there when you choose.
  • Hollywood hasn't soured on BitTorrent itself, only a bunch of w4r3z tracking sites.

  • What happened to all the... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Osrin (599427) * on Saturday February 25 2006, @06:30PM (#14801882) Homepage
    ... multicast and proxy technology that we have spent the last 10+ years working on to solve this problem?

    • Re:What happened to the MBONE? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Russ Nelson (33911) on Saturday February 25 2006, @07:16PM (#14802039) Homepage
      Whatever happened to the MBONE? I see that a book on the subject is now posted to the web and freely copyable because it's gone out of print. The MBONE FAQ dates from 1993. That's like (/me whips out his HP-41C calculator) 13 years old. Apparently the IETF has a group for MBONE Deployment, but it hasn't been updated since last September, and even then it was a year late for its final milestone.

    • Multicast works....it's political (Score:4, Informative)

      by Danathar (267989) on Saturday February 25 2006, @07:57PM (#14802142) Journal
      Multicast has been deployed on Internet2 for some time now. I've watched 720p streams multicasted from Europe with no problem.

      The problem with deploying it on the commercial Internet is political. Backbone commercial Internet providers have had multicast on for a LONG time. ISP's that give you your home broadband connection which are mostly cable TV operators and companies like verizon don't want to provide a cost effective way for content providers on the net to deliver video. They would rather charge you for their "middleman" service. It's not like they don't know how to enable it, all they need to do is enable it on their switches and routers.

      Most cable operators use multicast already to stream the channels through their set top boxes.

      In Britain The BBC is working with ISP's to multicast to broadband connections. That would REALLY be nice if something similar happened here (In the U.S.)

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/ [bbc.co.uk]
    • > What happened to all the multicast and proxy technology that we have spent the last 10+ years working on to solve this problem?

      The same that happened with IPv6 ? Technology is right here but currently almost nobody cares to use it...

  • Figures (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kawahee (901497) on Saturday February 25 2006, @06:32PM (#14801888) Homepage Journal
    "Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams"

    Assuming Akamai has only 10,000 servers, that's 15 streams per server. C'mon now, we're not that stupid.

  • The future is peer. (Score:3, Informative)

    by soupdevil (587476) on Saturday February 25 2006, @06:34PM (#14801895)
    Content creators and content consumers are becoming one and the same. You can see this every day on sites like Jamendo [jamendo.com] and Flickr [flickr.com].
    • No, they're not. 'Content consumers turned content creators' is nothing new, they just have a platform to distribute their work more easily now. This in no way suggests quality of work , it merely increases the signal to noise ratio.
      • The distribution is the new part. Distribution by a major corporation doesn't suggest quality of work either. Filters are necessary, but monolithic corporations are only one kind of filter. Tags, ratings and reviews are alternatives, and more will be on the way, I'm sure.
  • I recently attended a talk that was part of a PhD student's oral defense. He detailed a really nice streaming video system that is congestion optimized instead of rate optimized called CoDiO [stanford.edu]. I asked him how long he thinks it would take to market this, but I think he said that they're still working out the kinks in the practical application. So yeah, the technology is definitely there to stream video over P2P, but I don't know about DRM. Then again... regular terrestrial TV broadcasts aren't hampered wi

  • Great. Another prediction on what technology will or will not be able to do in the near future.

    We all know how accurate these are.

    Also: There is a difference between serving the exact same fucking content, at the same time to 1 million people and generating custom pages on-demand for 1 million people.

  • so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?

    No way. I'm gald to support the legal P2P community; I frequently leave Knoppix or other Linux distros running for weeks on end on a spare system here and make available my modest upstream bandwidth. And I can understand that some may want to use their bandwidth to share material that might anger the MPAA or RIAA (and particularly in the case of the RIAA I don't have very negative feelings about that). But that's a far cry from ever t

  • Why exactly would anyone want to donate their bandwidth to movie distributors? What benefit would you get out of it? Restricted viewing rights through DRM doesn't sound like a benefit to me. I don't see how they'd square this circle; it's not a reasonable trade-off.
  • I wouldn't worry about that.

    The computer and computing industry isn't standing still. Processor and signal transmission speeds increase exponentially. There will be quite enough bandwidth and processing power for everybody.
  • Cringely talked about a company called Grid Networks and their killer P2P app that may change TV distribution. They seem to have an interesting idea, but I wanted to look into it further. Owing to the genericness of their name, however, I haven't been able to devise a Google search that finds their website.

    Does anybody have any info on Grid Networks, or are they vaporware?

  • P2P is not "under control" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Saturday February 25 2006, @07:03PM (#14802001)
    And thus I don't really think they will switch to this model. Simply put: Their "servers" would not be under their control. If we were to provide them with "servers", we could at least partly control what is shown.

    Of course we would not get a say what we distribute. But that's not the point. You cannot rely on a P2P Server to provide real time content. Suddenly it's gone, because I switch the box off. Even if you have a few fallback "servers" on the list it's nothing you can build a reliable service on. And people do get angry if their favorite soap suddenly skips right after the words "I kept silent 'til now, but now I have to say it. I am..."

    Not to mention the danger of tampering with the content. Yes, they will encrypt it, yes, they will make it near impossible to inject anything, but there is still the danger that in the middle of a Disney Movie you suddenly get to see ... use your imagination.
    • ... but there is still the danger that in the middle of a Disney Movie you suddenly get to see ... George Carlin!

      "Fuck Mickey Mouse! Fuck him in the ass with a big rubber dick! And then break it off and beat him with it!"
      • The difference is that it wouldn't get an "E" rating that way.

        Not that it would be too bad for some shows. Considering the quality of some TV shows anything injected would certainly provide a lot more entertainment.
  • they aren't paying for my cable modem, and my cable modem has a maximum upstream speed of about 45 kilobytes per second. That isn't going to help anyone really. Not to mention, I wouldn't be all that keen on maxing out my upstream just so I could watch American Idol.

    Also, shouldn't they be paying ME to use MY bandwidth?
    • A P2P Tv and movie network should be free to its viewers, as over the air television is. The reason being, that we all end up paying for the bandwidth. So i dont want just a one dollar discount on movies in exchange for my bandwidth, I instead want the product for free.

      If you want me to watch your television, your commericials, while you profit in the millions of dollars AND use my bandwidth?!.... You're giving it to me free!

      Game on, you DRM motherfuckers :) Citizens need to play hardball.
  • maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?


    That seems unlikely to me... people would have to be willing to trade away their spare bandwidth for... what, exactly? Being able to watch movies/TV on their computer? They can do that now if they want, without having to run any "industry-approved" p2p clients (and all that that implies).

  • Plenty of P2P CDN's (Score:3, Informative)

    by ozzee (612196) on Saturday February 25 2006, @07:49PM (#14802122)


    Chaincast
    NetCableTV
    Red Swoosh
    Kontiki

    Just to name a few.

    Some of these have been in production for many years. Chaincast is/was the leader in radio streaming (at one time).

    There are more advantages with P2P streaming/downloads than meet the eye. You also get better sharing of data in the local network. i.e. you're at Starbucks, you see someone watching somthing you want too - start the download an you get it at full speed from one laptop directly to the next. Also, from an infrastructure pespective, it's automatically fault tolerant.

    It's big.

  • If ISP's were required to enable multicast all the way to the home all these video delivery problems would be MUCH easier.

    You want to see cable and DSL operators go nutz with foaming mouths, get your congressman to introduce a bill requiring multicast to be enabled on all routers and switches, and add a provision punishing ISP's who knowingly degrate UDP.

    Many people think that multicast is a failure and does not work, fact of the matter is, it's deployed WORLD WIDE on the backbones of both Internet and Inte

  • Revenue Streams (Score:5, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Saturday February 25 2006, @08:17PM (#14802191) Homepage Journal
    Cringeley doesn't mention Akamai. Where does this 150K max users figure come from? If "tens of thousands" of servers is only 10K servers, then 150K streams is only 15 streams:server.

    But even a $2K P4/4.3GHz can serve over 1750 simultaneous 500Kbps video streams (from my own benchmarks), for 875Mbps. Since Gbps fiberoptics cost <$5000:mo, or under $3:stream:mo, 10K servers should serve at least 17 million simultaneous users; 58K servers serve over 100 million simultaneous streams.

    Use more efficient servers, like SANs coupled more directly to routers, and you're talking about <$3:stream:mo for maybe 100K servers serving over 1 billion people, for a $100M investment that can be amortized over a few years. Years which can bring maybe $1-100:mo profit on 1-10 billion consumers, or 10-10,000x ROI.

    Such a network is much more efficient and economical as P2P, or multicast. But even the raw numbers sound very profitable. That's why Akamai is making so much money, even though their market is still so small.
    • I think the key issue is that everyone is asking for flawless, high quality, on demand data streams. We currently have streaming broadcasts over a User Datagram Protocol.

      The difference between UDP and other protocols is that UDP does not ensure that packets are not lost. This works well for audio and video because if you miss a frame or two, you probably won't notice too much. This is the equivalent of broadcasting a signal over the air waves. Sometimes it'll be a little fuzzy, but you can still unders
    • I beleive this is supposed to be more than multi-casting. I think Cringley was saying that Akami can't handle more than 150,000 simultanoues streams of the same stream let alone different streams. I bet they multi-cast those streams. As I read it he means that to multi-cast to 30 million folks you need to have a tree structure with each node multi-casting it's part. So now simply multi-casting is not the solution.

    • Here is an example of the correctness of your point.

      You can invest 30 minutes of your time watching yet another forumlaic sitcom on cable or the web, with perhaps a 10% chance-per-minute of having a really good laugh; or you can spend the same time clicking around YouTube.

      If only 25% of the amateur comedy on that site, and others like it, make you laugh heartily ... you'll end up with up to 7.5 times as many laughs!

      (Thoughly bogus mathematics provided for illustrative purposes only!)

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