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What are you going to do?

Develop a better video format which can deliver the same image quality at a lower bitrate. The AV1 encoder is still slow but it's improving. Dav1d is a fast decoder implementation.

Netflix sees AV1 as its primary next-gen video format.

AV1 beats H.265 on quality. The libaom AV1 encoder is still very slow but it's improving, and there are other encoder efforts like rav1e which are faster but don't yet produce the same image quality.

There are various AV1 demos you can try in Chrome and Firefox. I'm using Firefox 64 beta with "media.av1.enabled" set to true in about:config. Bitmovin has a demo.

You can switch on AV1 for YouTube via their TestTube page and try some high bitrate videos in their AV1 demo playlist. Many YouTube videos have AV1 encodes available up to 720p resolution (try popular music videos to see examples), but YouTube's not optimizing for file size yet. The standard definition AV1 encodes typically have smaller file sizes than the VP9 equivalents, but the 720p AV1 encodes are typically of similar or even larger file sizes than the VP9 versions.

but is there any reason this is a big deal ?

Yes, AV1 is a royalty-free, efficient video codec that has good industry support. Anyone can implement AV1 without having to pay patent licensing fees, as opposed to H.264 and most especially as opposed to HEVC (aka H.265).

AV1 outperforms VP9 and as time goes on AV1 will become the dominant video codec on the web.

Current benchmarks (mostly synthetic tests) already show promising advantages in favour of AV-1 (the previous /. on AV-1's official announcement has links. Here 's yet another)
i.e.: per bits, it managed to pack more information than H265/HEVC

Now the psycho-visual optimization needs to be tuned a bit (the compressor need to learn better *which* of the information to pack or drop for a given amount of bits, but in general AV1 allows for more). And Netflix and Google should release more of the quality oriented tests (subjective tests from actual humans, and from AIs trained to have a somewhat similar response to human's visual system).
(As AV1 was just released, it's compressor isn't finely tuned yet and might wasting bit on packing information that an actual human viewer wouldn't give a shit)
(just like back when it was release x265 compressor didn't perform as visually pleasing as the older and better tested x264 compressor)

Over all that isn't much as a surprise.

H265/HEVC is an already released codec with a history.
AV1 is the new comer released now and supposed to be the next generation.

H265/HEVC isn't AV1's main competitor
AV1 supposed competitor is the next gen codec that will come out of MPEG (JVET), but that one isn't any close to release (but is expected to perform similarily good as AV1 compared to H265/HEVC)
Also the licensing shitstorm of JVET will also need to get solved once it is released, whereas the whole purpose that sparked AV1 was to make it royalty free.

Hmm, they seem to be talking across each other. We know that Netflix is actually offering HEVC (h.265) streams right now, per my original link; and here is their manager of encoding technology talking about it back in 2014.

What a mess now there is a third licensing pool for h.265...
http://blog.streamingmedia.com...

You realize there's a big world outside of the web browser, right? Take a look at the home theatre isle at your local electronics store; visit a camera shop. When I see a codec move into that market, I take it seriously.

It's not at all surprising to see Google's codec is mandatory on Google's Android OS and Google's WebRTC. That's a no brainer.

Apple has patents in the HEVC pool, and if memory serves, the late Steve Jobs lead the (failed) charge to try to get VP8 into the MPEG patent pool, so there may be bad blood with respect to the various incantations of VP8/9.

Google is supporting its codec, and Apple appears to be supporting the codec they worked on. AV1 is interesting, but VP9 is less so: Netflix's internal testing showed x.265 outperforming VP9 by an average of 20%.

So Apple isn't exactly crazy in deciding VP9 isn't worth its time; HEVC is the better codec, and is the ISO/ITU/MPEG standard.

If AV1 meets its goals, then it can give HEVC a run for its money - and I'm all for that. But for 2017 and likely most of 2018, HEVC is the codec to beat.

I did realize after posting that VP6 & 7 were On2's proprietary codecs before they were bought by Google; sorry for that.

Since 99% of the cost of providing service is the trenching, this will make the market far more competitive.

Citation, please...

Just so you can get the correct citation, do you want the costs of wiring with the government seizing a right of way for you, or costs of wiring if you have to individually negotiate with every property owner whose land you are going to dig up?

Here's a fancy little equation from 2011 that doesn't include buying the property, and is just the cost of installation, not maintance or upgrades: cost per house = 3072 + 13365*(houses/mile) - 0.8867*houses + 25.04*frost_index + 17700*wetlands_pct + $1376*soil_texture + 165.40*road_intersection_frequency That equation is "rural" installation, costs are probably way higher in an urban environment where you have your choice of installing everything under the sidewalk the entire way or everything under the street the entire way. Suburbia is going to be a mix of the two.

As for IP transit? as low as $0.45/mbps and falling

Perhaps your usage is in that top percentile of users that will go over 1tb. If you are really in the top 1% of users, I think paying another $50 a month is justified.

The truth is that the marginal cost of a 1TB of data is on the order of a few dollars. In which case $50 is massive overkill considering that the average bandwidth usage is just 190GB/month.

Here's what wholesale bandwidth costs today:
Bulk IP transit costs:

10Gbps: $0.85 -- $1.10 Mbps
20Gbps: $0.75 -- $0.95 Mbps
40Gbps: $0.62 -- $0.80 Mbps
75Gbps: $0.55 -- $0.70 Mbps
100Gbps: $0.45 -- $0.60 Mbps

1mbps, running flat-out 24 hours per day for 30 days is just a tad under 1TB.
So multiply by 10 to more than compensate for peak usage and all other overhead.
That works out to $6/TB or less at the kind of wholesale prices that big ISPs pay.

Lets say your internet bill is roughly $60/month. Even with all the fixed overhead for hardware and support staff, that leaves a ton of margin since most customers are only doing 190GB/month.

Data caps are nothing more than abuse of monopoly status.

In the article... http://www.streamingmedia.com/...

It will, though, eventually become the standard.

I don't think so. Not for Internet video applications. The patent licensing for H.265 is a mess and the x265 guys are pleading with the industry to get the their act together.

Meanwhile, VP9 is royalty-free and VP9's successor, AV1, will also be royalty-free. So why pay patent royalties on video encoding, decoding, and the mere distribution of video content when you don't have to?

Telesyncing the display in this manner is "difficult".

It's trivial.

BPG is not viable due to the licensing situation around HEVC. Don't waste your time on formats which require patent royalty payments. AV1 is the future of web video, so a new still image format based on that (similar to WebP) is a better option.

I had a lengthy conversation with netflix support, apparently, there is NO way to view 4K netflix content except for a smart TV that supports "software" as they call it. Essentially, its DRM as demanded by studio.

Is it DRM or is it just because Netflix is encoding their 4K content with H.265 (aka HEVC). There is no H.265 support in browsers and it's unlikely there ever will be due to patent licensing issues (two separate patent pools which means two separate patent licenses and there are rumours that there will be a third pool). Fortunately, the future for web video is AV1, royalty-free and aiming to be better than H.265 (see Alliance for Open Media and NetVC). In the meantime, Netflix is looking to stream 4K with VP9 so that may be an option for you soon.

1. Not all transit providers are equal. Some make better deals with peers than others.

Not all watermelons are equal, either; some are larger and/or have fewer seeds than others. In fact, outside of mathematics, it is quite rare to find two truly equal entities. Basically, inequality is a given in the real world. Hell, not all streaming video providers are equal, which is why many people subscribe to two or more. In fact, Netflix uses multiple transit providers[1-8] for similar reasons.

2. Some transit providers are less expensive because they lack the ability to make the best deals with peers.

This is just plain backwards. A transit provider who makes better peering deals has lower costs, so they don't have to charge as much! I know this seems counter-intuitive when you consider that those providers also offer a better service, as you'd think that's something they could charge a premium for, but it should make a bit more sense when you consider the corollary: a transit provider who makes worse peering deals has higher costs, which they must recoup from their customer. Sort of like how Costco charges less because they make better deals buying in bulk; or, rather, other retailers must charge more because they didn't make the same deals.

3. To cut costs, Netflix chose a less expensive transit provider.

First of all, your assertion that Netflix uses a single transit provider is just plain wrong[1-8]. It has been made public knowledge (despite being none of our damn business) that their primary transit providers are Level 3 and Cogent[1-8], and that they purchase transit services from at least 4 other providers, Tata, XO, NTT, and Telia[1,3].

As for your assertion that Netflix only buys from the lowest bidder, well, it appears that the buy from anyone who can provide transit between them and the networks their customers are on[1-8]. Not only do they buy transit from all three available providers who route directly from their POIs to Comcast's[1], they even buy transit from Comcast now[3]. And, despite that, I still see buffering issues with Netflix on a 75Mbps Comcast Business connection, which points to the issue not lying with Level 3, Cogent, or any of Comcast's other providers with names not starting with C and rhyming with "bombast".

In case you want sources, here[1] are[2] a[3] few[4] you[5] can[6] check[7]. out[8].

At least you proved you weren't trolling; I guess that only leaves one other possibility.

Footnotes:
[1] "Netflix attempted to address congested routes into Comcast by purchasing all available transit capacity from transit providers that did not pay access fees to Comcast—which involved agreements with Cogent, Level 3, NTT, TeliaSonera, Tata, and X0 Communications. Although all six of those providers sold transit to the ent

1. Not all transit providers are equal. Some make better deals with peers than others.

Not all watermelons are equal, either; some are larger and/or have fewer seeds than others. In fact, outside of mathematics, it is quite rare to find two truly equal entities. Basically, inequality is a given in the real world. Hell, not all streaming video providers are equal, which is why many people subscribe to two or more. In fact, Netflix uses multiple transit providers[1-8] for similar reasons.

2. Some transit providers are less expensive because they lack the ability to make the best deals with peers.

This is just plain backwards. A transit provider who makes better peering deals has lower costs, so they don't have to charge as much! I know this seems counter-intuitive when you consider that those providers also offer a better service, as you'd think that's something they could charge a premium for, but it should make a bit more sense when you consider the corollary: a transit provider who makes worse peering deals has higher costs, which they must recoup from their customer. Sort of like how Costco charges less because they make better deals buying in bulk; or, rather, other retailers must charge more because they didn't make the same deals.

3. To cut costs, Netflix chose a less expensive transit provider.

First of all, your assertion that Netflix uses a single transit provider is just plain wrong[1-8]. It has been made public knowledge (despite being none of our damn business) that their primary transit providers are Level 3 and Cogent[1-8], and that they purchase transit services from at least 4 other providers, Tata, XO, NTT, and Telia[1,3].

As for your assertion that Netflix only buys from the lowest bidder, well, it appears that the buy from anyone who can provide transit between them and the networks their customers are on[1-8]. Not only do they buy transit from all three available providers who route directly from their POIs to Comcast's[1], they even buy transit from Comcast now[3]. And, despite that, I still see buffering issues with Netflix on a 75Mbps Comcast Business connection, which points to the issue not lying with Level 3, Cogent, or any of Comcast's other providers with names not starting with C and rhyming with "bombast".

In case you want sources, here[1] are[2] a[3] few[4] you[5] can[6] check[7]. out[8].

At least you proved you weren't trolling; I guess that only leaves one other possibility.

Footnotes:
[1] "Netflix attempted to address congested routes into Comcast by purchasing all available transit capacity from transit providers that did not pay access fees to Comcast—which involved agreements with Cogent, Level 3, NTT, TeliaSonera, Tata, and X0 Communications. Although all six of those providers sold transit to the ent

256 GB divided by 12 hours would correspond to a bandwidth of about 48.5 Mb/s. That's more than enough to support compressed 4K video.

Consider that UMAX in Korea supports streaming of compressed 4K video at 60 fps progressive, using 32 Mb/s of bandwidth.

I think its more a matter of (potentially) saving 20% versus what they are using now.

Didn't read the whole blurb, but they are probably going full-in on HEVC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

The Wikipedia article mentions 50-60% savings using HEVC over H.264 depending on resolution, but chances are these are optimum subjective results. My Little Pony (and other animated shows) would probably encode much tighter compared to media that is action/visually dynamic.

Netflix may be looking at that 20% as a realistic figure for their library as a whole, baring in mind realistic encoding savings and the size of their catalog in various categories.

From 2 years ago which seems to forecast where they are now: http://www.streamingmedia.com/...

I think they're being pressured by the unreasonable financial demands of the h265 patent pool

And because there are two, separate patent pools for H.265 from which Microsoft needs to buy two, separate patent licenses. There are also rumours that a third patent pool for H.265 is forming. The licensing for H.265 is a mess. It's so much easier to go with royalty-free video and audio for the web, which is what Microsoft seems to be doing.

The real issue is that the patent pool for h265 is getting greedy, and planning to charge a *lot* more than h264 use, and in more circumstances. All these companies have an incentive to create a next-generation codec that can be licensed for no cost, because they're either providing platforms for this content or streaming content themselves.

So, what you're seeing here is a natural market reaction to the overreach of the h265 pool, and it makes sense to combine their efforts and technologies to deliver a single superior codec that everyone can use. If they follow through with their promise of an open codec, it's definitely going to be a big win for these companies AND consumers. Moreover, as a purely pragmatic matter, it will allow more streaming for less bandwidth overall, something that's also important for many users with data caps.

Lawsuits are almost inevitable, simply because they're threatening to destroy a potentially lucrative patent pool's effectiveness. Fortunately, this is a talented group with some legal and financial muscle behind it, so I think they have a good shot at succeeding.

There is a lot of stuff going on with HEVC:

1) Ultra HD Blu-ray is about to roll-out based on HEVC
2) ATSC 3.0 new digital broadcast standard with HEVC is being finalized
3) DVB and others are considering HEVC for digital broadcast
4) UHD/4K with HEVC is being deployed by OTT like Netflix as well as direct broadcast satellite like DirecTV and wireline like BT.

The HEVC Advance patent pool unlimited content royalties that was recently announced are giving content distributors a lot of concern. In the professional content world, it is understood that enabling technology intellectual property needs to be paid, but when you are talking about unlimited percentages of "all direct & indirect revenue" from content, not only is the cost too high, but the accounting is impossible.

Meanwhile from a bit rate versus quality level, VP9 is clearly not performing as well as HEVC.

If Cisco can show that Thor can perform nearly was well as HEVC, there are a lot of content distribution companies that will take it more seriously than they would have just a few months ago because of the HEVC Advance content royalty.

However the enabling factor would be if Cisco (and other Thor implementers) will indemnify users (i.e. content distributors) from any infringement by the use of their encoders/decoders.

H.265 is going to become the standard in the near future

RTA, They are asking for too much money and too much hassle, I don't think they'll get many users as a result.

First: computers/devices are designed to let their CPUs run at 100% with whatever cooling mechanism they have designed.

Which requires a lot of electricity - internet streaming and hard disk space don't require a lot of electricity. So I'd prefer that H.265 doesn't make it big until most equipment has dedicated decoder silicon.

The Netflix client logic is fairly complex (it dynamically jumps between servers, bitrates, and so on).

Yeah, that's why Netflix was originally WiMP-based. (whoops, could have sworn it used flash at one time, but DRM-only hence no Linux then. Maybe once it was flash UI with WIMP backend?) Because it can handle cool stuff like jumping between servers, bitrates, and so on. They switched to Silverlight for both UI and video fairly early on, and the rest is either history, or happening right now. On OSX it's already using HTML5 video on Safari, and on Windows it's supposed to be HTML5 on IE11. ISTR an article about how Firefox is going to go ahead and take on a closed video component to permit it to also play HTML5 DRM video, so perhaps we'll have Netflix in Firefox on Linux, which would be a big step forward for Linux-based entertainment centers. I have no problems with Netflix under XP32 in VMWare Player with a Linux host, except that it doesn't integrate with Kodi.

You're arguement lacks merit. The size of the pipe is not the problem.

Verizon is still throttling Netflix even after being paid.

Netflix has offered to host servers closer to the end users, freeing up bandwidth on the backbones.

This fight is not about network capacity or technology. It is about money, plain and simple.

Whoever was in charge of the live stream are a bunch of amateurs, incompetent idiots and should be fired, publicity shamed and never hired again.

According to this article there were a number of issues which were all caused by Apple rather than Akamai:

The bottom line with this event is that the encoding, translation, JavaScript code, the video player, the call to S3 single storage location and the millisecond refreshes all didn't work properly together and was the root cause of Apple's failed attempt to make the live stream work without any problems. So while it would be easy to say it was a CDN capacity issue, which was my initial thought considering how many events are taking place today and this week, it does not appear that a lack of capacity played any part in the event not working properly. Apple simply didn't provision and plan for the event properly.

I don't know enough about streaming to comment on the validity of the assertions made.

Yes, I know Cogent is a large network provider. I am a Cogent customer. Some articles I have read referred to Cogent's relationship to Netflix as a CDN despite the fact that Cogent does not offer a CDN service. Netflix was building their own CDN using Cogent Here’s How The Comcast & Netflix Deal Is Structured, With Data & Numbers. I wasn't completely comfortable with the term when I first read it, but it did make sense that Netflix was using Cogent's peering to deliver content to ISP's and to their content caching boxes. If it makes you feel better, I will stop referring to their relationship as a CDN

We won't forget this.

Haha, that's what everyone said about the separating of DVD and streaming services, which was an effective price hike.

But in all seriousness, there was nothing special about the deal, it was a peering agreement, which is STANDARD procedure for EVERYONE. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with Net Neutrality. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea how the system works and has worked since the Internet originally went commercial. Not... One... Clue... This is how the Internet as most everyone knows it has always, always, worked.

For those who can't grasp this concept, here's an easy reference article: http://blog.streamingmedia.com...

(Sorry, a properly grammatical title would not fit in the space allotted)

Netflix & Level 3 Only Telling Half The Story, Won’t Detail What Changes They Want To Net Neutrality

In a fairly deep and interesting article over at StreamingMedia.com, Dan Rayburn argues that there is more to the story here and that neither Netflix nor Level 3 are giving us their proposed solutions. He goes through both the Netflix and the Level3 blog posts, taking them apart very carefully.

It is not a network neutrality problem, but rather a business problem. Worthwhile read.

So, I attended the Streaming Media West conference last month, and one of the things I came away with was how the existing players (Hollywood, cable companies, etc.) are adamant about ensuring an "orderly transition to IP-based delivery." That is an exact quote from one of the over-the-top (OTT) sessions I went to, where over-the-top refers to content delivered over IP directly to the user from someone other than the broadband provider (e.g., watching a movie from Netflix instead of from your cable company's video-on-demand service).

This is very much the point of the "TV Everywhere" systems by which you login with your cable or satellite credentials in order to watch cable/satellite content on a mobile device or set-top box (iPad, Roku, etc.). It's basically a rear-guard action against the cord-cutters: we'll let you watch the same content on any device, provided you pay the same price for it. Keep paying your cable bill, even if you don't watch cable.

I wrote a long blog about the show here. But taking it back to the Comcast / Time Warner deal, the competitive issue is not in individual markets (where, indeed, there's usually only one cable company), but in the power of a combined Comcast / Time Warner to keep creatives in the old system, by using caps, throttling, predatory pricing, and other dirty tricks to hamper genuine Internet TV.

Presumably, once the Justice Department comes to understand the antitrust implications of this deal, they'll immediately launch an investigation. Of Apple.

Guess this is different from yesterday's story in Streaming Media, Telestream Helps Launch Open Source x265/HEVC Project, which offers a H.265 encoder, available under either GPL or commerical license.

This story is from last month, and was widely covered by Streaming Media and others. It was probably posted to /. at that time, too.

The Netflix streaming library sucks and hasn't improved much in the last few years. Estimates show it has gone up by about 3000 titles. Hardly a winning argument. Look at their 'new' selection and the answer is obvious. They suck and certainly haven't 'improved' in the last few years. I've seen two price increases in the short time I've been with them, and I've yet to see a dramatic improvement in quantity or quality of titles.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2010/10/is-netflixs-inventory-of-streaming-content-growing-fast-enough.html

I'm tempted to just cancel it all and go for an HD streaming solution with better front tier titles from another vendor. I'm just not seeing the worth of all of these price increases.

Netflix is a CDN, they are currently on Akamai, and I would be very surprised if ATT didn't have Akamai servers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2010/03/akamai-now-the-primary-cdn-for-netflix-but-at-a-very-low-price.html

Therefore, no, they don't increase traffic over the peering links.

250 GB / 31 days =~ 8 GB/day. According to this site mentioned elsewhere in the thread, a two hour SD show is about 1.8GB and HD is 3GB. So, that yields 0.9GB to 1.5GB per hour. That's roughly 5 - 9 hours of Netflix a day, depending on quality.

We should be able to stay within that without much trouble. YMMV.
-l

What's the average Netflix data rate?

On Xbox 360, 1.8 GB per movie (source).

Riiiiight. Something that sucks the living hell out of a battery, that has ZERO hardware acceleration on mobile, which frankly makes it worthless to a large majority of devices, isn't supported by the vast majority which means you'll have to give them a pop up anyway or bake in a half ass "solution" that runs like ass on all because it is optimized for nothing. oh and has the number of websites actually using it numbering less than the amount of digits on RMS. Yep, that'll work...not.

Why FOSSies are bound and determined to keep getting into fights they have NO chance of winning is beyond me. Hell look at Vorbis, when they launched it was there ANYONE that thought they had a snowball's chance in hell of unseating MP3 at that late stage of the game? Nope, but all that effort was wasted anyway, same as with Theora. It isn't like your "solution" is some kick ass product that brings new and powerful features to the table it isn't even as good as what is currently in use!

My prediction? All this WebM bullshit will simply kill HTML V5 video tag deader than Dixie and entrench flash for the foreseeable future which I'm sure you and Adobe are REAL happy about. Hell if I was Adobe I'd have "We heart Google!" week and send Brin a nice cake. Because thanks to Google the easiest thing to do will be to simply serve up the raw H.264 for iDevice and those of us that have the codec and for everyone else wrap it in a flash. Tada! I just covered a good 90% of the web with almost NO effort! So I hope you like flash, because thanks to Google trying to start another format war it is here to stay.

The word "utility" is practically synonymous with "delivered by network with huge front-end costs". Water, Sewer, Electric, Gas: the big bucks are in burying or stringing all those miles of network connections to your house. The incremental costs per unit of product delivered (sewer: "taken away") are generally small.

Almost no utility can offer unlimited usage of the product, though - unlimited local calling on your telephone network was the first. The incremental cost per local call was so very low, however, that they went with it. That's valuable information, because it tells you that the very common $30/month/house costs for telephone are just a little over the cost of having a phone network come to your house at all.

Everybody else buries the fixed-costs of providing the network in the cost-per-unit of the product, meaning low users get a subsidized network connection, and heavy-volume users subsidize other's networks.

Usage "caps" (they aren't actually caps unless your modem shuts off) - which are really gargantuan markups on incremental costs, do the save thing; but "unlimited" usage does the opposite: low users subsidize heavy ones.

Here's a radical suggestion: why not have the Internet be provided by the first utility.that actually uses FREE MARKET FORCES to match usage with real costs.

Many thanks to the other poster who provided the link to the fact that Netflix seems to be able to buy bandwidth in bulk for 3 cents a GB:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/03/estimates-on-what-it-costs-netflixs-to-stream-movies.html

So, we have all the information we need for a truly fair billing structure: $30/month, plus a nickel a GB - a dime a GB at peak times. Most people would pay about $32 per month, heavy users $40 or $50. When you compare that to what the ISPs were after, it's plain they were out for a major gouge, which is very typical of privately-owned utilities that achieve regulatory capture and don't have an irate citizenry disrupting the heist.

The notion that anybody should be paying $70 or $80 per month for a bunch of electrical pulses is easily dismissed by the cost of delivering water to your house. In contrast to wires that weigh a few grams per metre, a tonne of sterilized water, cleaned in huge, billion-dollar treatment plants that take hundreds of people to run and pumped long distances, usually uphill from a river by massive pumps, are delivered to your house through heavy, expensively buried cast-iron water mains that break every day at a cost of thousands per break: and your water bill is probably under $50/month for 30 tonnes of water.

But I'm not happy to see caps or unlimited - both are unfair. As a friend of mine put it when "unlimited" cable broadband came in 14 years ago here, "Great; people will leave HDTV streaming for four weeks straight to keep the cat company while they're on a long vacation." Considering HDTV was 10 years in the future at the time, I think he was pretty prescient.

I wrote this blog post yesterday and planned to send an edited version to my MP as well, before I read the news that the decision is going to be repealed. I think I'll still send the letter to my MP as an encouragement to make sure his party leader comes through on his promise.

The fox guarding the henhouse

Many other people have written articles and commentary about the CRTC's decision to allow Bell to force its wholesale customers to accept usage-based billing (UBB). This is my take on it.

I've been a very happy customer of Teksavvy for the past few years. Teksavvy's prices and policies are fair and reasonable. Teksavvy provides jobs to Canadians. Teksavvy has been one of the companies leading the charge to protect customers Bell's dishonest and anticompetitive practices. Currently I pay $32 per month for DSL from Teksavvy, which gives me 200GB per month of data use.

Thanks to the CRTC's decision in line with Bell Canada and against Canadians, my monthly cap is going to be reduced to 25GB. In Ontario, the cost per gigabyte of overage is going to be $1.90. Fortunately, my base rate will also be decreasing in acknowledgement of the fact that my bandwidth allotment is being reduced by 87.5 percent. No wait, I lied. Of course it's not. This is just a cash grab by Bell, sanctioned by the CRTC, at the expense of Canadians.

How much is this extra bandwidth going to cost? Bandwidth needs for HD movies range from about 1.5-2 GB per hour. Therefore a two hour movie will cost about $6.70 to stream in overage charges. Put another way, if you stream one hour of HD TV a day, you'll use about 53GB of data a month, just in video streaming. That's before you've done things like check your email or the weather. You'll be looking at about $52 in overage charges. That pays for a reasonable cable or satellite TV plan. I use this comparison because, of course, Bell also provides satellite television and does not want you to stop paying them $50+ per month for that in order to watch your TV online. I'm reminded of Roger's announcement last year of a reduction in bandwidth that they publicized the day after Netflix announced they were coming to Canada. An interesting coincidence.

Back to that $6.70 in streaming charges. If you rent a movie on iTunes, you'll pay $6 to rent the movie. That means if (when) you're over your bandwidth cap, to actually watch a movie, you'll be spending $12.70. That's completely ridiculous!

I read somewhere, I think in a post from Teksavvy, that this is over one thousand times the actual incremental cost that Bell incurs. In other words, Bell pays less than one fifth of one cent per GB, yet the CRTC thinks it's fair to charge consumers almost two dollars. To use another comparison, it costs Netflix at most about $0.03 per GB to stream videos. If the owners of the network between Netflix and me are able to make money off Netflix by charging them $0.03 per GB, how is it even remotely approaching fair that Bell is allowed to charge me $1.90 for that same data?

I'll admit, I'm a heavy user. I'm not sure exactly how much bandwidth I use, but it's a lot. I'm a self-employed e-commerce consultant and I work at home. My job involves me regularly uploading and downloading very large files of several gigabytes each. We have two children and probably watch about an hour of TV per day that's been streamed or downloaded off the internet. We cancelled our satellite service as we found we were paying about $15 per hour of TV actually watched, and all our video entertainment comes from the internet. We subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from iTunes. Of course Bell doesn't like people like me, as I've given up on paying for their last-century business model of paying huge monthly fees for television to be broadcast to me on the network's ag

GIF, JPEG, and MPEG1 expired and we still use them.

GIF isn't used all that much. Its compression is inferior to PNG, and it only supports 8 bit color, which looks very unimpressive. Also animations are a lot less common these days.

JPEG I'll grant you that. But with still images it's easy to afford being suboptimal. Bandwidth increased, but there's not that much need in adding more images to a website. With video, the much increased resolution means that a better algorithm makes a most noticeable difference.

MPEG1 remains pretty much exclusively for legacy use. Nobody sane is streaming that from their website, because a better codec can save so much bandwidth.

I listen to music at 12 kbit/s. Sounds a bit like AM Radio, but that is fine with me. If you want CD quality you can get it at 48k using MPEG's AACplus format.

48k is not CD quality in any case because it's lossy compression that will always miss something from the CD. Sure it can be good, but it's not original.

NO open source can do that because open source (codecs) are almost always a generation behind what the pros are doing. So why the hell would I choose an inferior codec??? I'm not a zealot or religious.

WebM isn't something made by a couple guys in a garage. It's based on VP8, a commercial product made by a company Google acquired, which was later relicensed. It's just as "pro" as any other codec, unless you're going to argue a license change somehow magically affects the quality.

And the quality is quite good

Adding support for H.264 is actually useful, unlike Theora support. Also, it's largely a game of upsmanship, basically saying, "here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

Upsmanship?

More like feathering ones own nest.
After all, Microsoft is a member of the H.264 Licensors. They stand to profit by the continued adoption of H.264.

Actually, I can't even see Google getting all fussed about this, because they will not have to pay a license fee in 2016 because its not part of Chrome proper. Microsoft may not need to pay either, since as members they may get a free pass (just speculation on my part there).

It isn't about Theora, and there are potential third party patent claims against Theora too.

The whole point Google Still, there is no reason to run head long into H.264 believing there will be no end to the free use of this rat's nest of patents. Did we learn nothing during the GIF saga? With the time available, the orderly move away from H.264 is clearly the way to go.

So view this Microsoft offering for what it is, not so much as a shot across Google's bow as it is a way of protecting their own pocketbook, even at the expense of their own browser offering. Its all about the future revenue.

The streamed content is nowhere near the size of the data on a DVD. If they were streaming the entire DVD it would cost much more.

It's is claimed between 1.8 and 3 GB per movie. Quite a bit less than DVD bitrate, but it's not 350 MB/hr like a lot of torrents used to be, either.

Subjectively, I think the visual quality of HD netflix streams easily surpasses DVD, evidently due to more efficient encoding. (Maybe I'm just not watching enough visually-frenzied action movies).

Try buying a video camera that doesn't use either x264 or mpeg2 video codecs. Every major video camera maker, and just about every minor one uses these codecs.

That's the whole point of creating a standard high quality codec. Would you rather Sony, Olympus, etc., all have their own incompatible formats? What's worse, is these formats would be limited in quality by lack of licensing of patents.

By pooling their patents, a codec which is legal, high quality, and universally supported is possible.

So when you buy them, you have to pay the royalty fees. That would be what I would consider maximizing profits.

How is the free choices of other, non-MPEG-LA members an example of MPEG-LA maximizing their profits?

Sony pays more to license H.264 than they receive in royalties from their licensing fees, by definition. So how is this Sony maximizing their profits? Wouldn't it be better to use their own, proprietary codec?

It would be more profitable, but it would not be better. They tried that with ATRAC and UMD and it didn't work. What *does* work is having an open format which is high quality and universally supported.

As I mentioned, it strangled out competition so that MPEG-LA, and ONLY MPEG-LA is profiting from this. It kills any form of competition which is never a good thing. It has been shown numerous times in numerous business fields. And what good does a free to use codec do? It allows people to use their videos and try to make money from their hard work without having to pay even more money on top of their investment of the tools they already paid for or worry about it being denied. If I made a for-profit movie that shows the downfalls of relying upon the MPEG-LA's licensed technologies and promote free to use ones, I'm likely to have the MPEG-LA want to figure out a legal way to refuse it which would cause me to lose time and money, a risk I shouldn't have to worry about. And there is always other problems. Without competition, a company won't bother to improve their products to the extent that it can be because that costs money.

There are other codecs that would work just as great and are flexible and free to use (like Googles own WebM as an example) but the owners of the other codecs don't have the muscle of MPEG-LA, so they get strangled out so the MPEG-LA, and only MPEG-LA, is profiting from digital video codec sales.

Google can join MPEG-LA. And to assert that WebM would work "just as great" is absolute bullshit at this point in time. A standard that is widely supported is far superior to even a better format that is poorly supported. Doubly so when it comes to battery life of handheld devices. But WebM isn't even technologically better in any way. H.264 is superior. The *only* thing WebM has on H.264 is its licensing arrangement (and even that's dubious given the likelihood of it infringing upon MPEG-LA's patents).

To start with, there is no real reason that Google should have to agree to MPEG-LA's rules if they don't want to. Nor is h.264 superior, as tests have shown that they are neck to neck (with WebM's code not being optimized). The only times h.264 was done better was went it was assisted by the GPU which isn't in most mobile devices. Now as WebM becomes more mature and optimized, it might very well be a more superior.

It also gives the MPEG-LA power over how people use the videos they make. According to the licensing of x264, you will also need an additional license to use your digital video commercially, and since any video made with a digital video recording (becoming quite the norm with most people) that means that MPEG-LA yet again has their fingers in the pie for more money.

Big deal. If you are using your video commerc

Nope, I was referring to this page that I saw last Spring.

Using still images to compare video codec quality makes as much sense as using 0.03-second samples of a song to compare audio quality.

How about this test, which clearly shows VP8 requiring 50% more bitrate to achieve the same objective quality metric.

As far as subjective quality goes, I manage video for an online training site, and we have been evaluating WebM extensively. Even with the most recent 0.9.5 releases, quality at normal web bitrates (say 750kbps for SD) is very inferior to the best H.264 encoders (x264 and Ateme). We did an internal subjective quality survey with our non-technical staff (secretaries, salespeople, etc.) and H.264 won hands-down. We're not interested in increasing our bandwidth bills by 50% to achieve the same quality as H.264, as the licensing fees are very small. Not to mention the browser and device support hassles that currently exist. Oh, and the current WebM toolchain sucks compared with the H.264 ecosystem, but that should improve over time.

By the way, those of you who comare WebM to H.264 using video encoded by Apple's or Adobe's H.264 encoders and say "WebM is almost as good as H.264!" are fooling themselves. The Aplle and Adobe encoders are two of the worst-looking H.264 encoders available.

Are you trolling, or are you actually this ignorant of the topic at hand?

WebM is inferior shit compared to MPEG4 video. WebM is almost as ugly as MPEG2 video.

Really?

Furthermore it's not necessary to adopt WebM since MPEG4 is only a few years from being public domain/open source itself.

How many years?

I don't have a website but if I did, I would no longer support Chrome..... at least not for video. Everything would be encoded as either Flash or H264/MPEG4, and Chrome would just have to display a broken link.

Despite Chrome supporting Flash? And despite you using Flash? Do you just enjoy antagonizing your users?

I mean, I'd provide a similar link for IE users, or at least users of older versions of IE, but I wouldn't deliberately break the site, I'd just gently remind them that stuff might be broken.

Users would need to go get themselves a REAL browser (such as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla/Seamonkey, or Opera) that doesn't ignore the MPEG4 standard virtually everyone else in the world uses.

Not a single browser you mentioned currently supports H.264 in HTML5 video. They only support it in Flash, just as Chrome does.

Is there a single true thing you said here? Maybe H.264 will actually expire in a few years...

Nope, I was referring to this page that I saw last Spring.

This is nonsense. Netflix uses CDNs, and I'll bet the big ISPs have peering agreements with these networks. I think they're all aching to get into the cell phone overage model and the cable companies obviously want to shut out their competition.

There is no talk of making any codec mandatory for HTML5 video. None.

Well, there were Ogg formats in the draft HTML5 spec. But then they were pulled out because Nokia and Apple got all tantrum-y about the whole thing. Really.

Having a default video codec would mean that people could just assume that there's Ogg Theora playback... or that there's Ogg Vorbis playback. Actually, as much contention as there was about Ogg Theora, I don't understand why people couldn't just compromise on getting Ogg Vorbis stuck in there. Even implemented in software, the iPhone and other handheld hardware could decode files very easily, and at least we'd finally be on our way towards sticking a fork in MP3.

HTML5 video specifically relies on the underlying browser (or OS) to provide decoding.

By definition, yes (unless you're relying on in-the-cloud decoding or magical pixies or something...), but I digress.

Just as you can put whatever kind of image you want in an img tag and rely on the browser to render it (if it can)...

Many browsers can't handle TIFF files, or BMP files, and last I checked IE had problems with PNGs and mostly barfed on SVG...

Most browsers (ie not Firefox) pass on video decoding to the operating system.

Many browsers may do so, but Firefox still has ~ 31% of the marketshare, about twice as much as Chrome, Safari, and Opera combined (source: wikipedia).

So what I'm saying is: Don't write off Fox... or the big red dinosaur (take your pick).

As most users have OS X or Windows, for which free, licensed h.264 decoders are readily available

That's free as in 'freeware', not Free as in Freedom.

or Linux with a GPU that has a hardware (also licensed) h.264 decoder

I actually don't know the numbers on this one and I'm curious about it. What percentage of hardware shipped today (desktops, servers, handhelds, etc...) has a fully-licensed (by the MPEG-LA) hardware decoder for H.264 in it?

And I'm no lawyer, but I wouldn't put it past the MPEG-LA to sue someone for using an H.264 software decoder, even if the hardware they were running it on had a fully-licensed hardware decoder in it.

most users don't have to worry about all this licensing malarkey.

I really wish that this were true, but I'm afraid that it's not the case. Just think for a second -- the H.264 hardware is only licensed for decoding not encoding. So if you want to upload a video from your DV-cam to your website or put it in your presentation, you'll need a license to go along with whatever software you use (or you'll need to pay a fee for software that includes such a license).

I'd root for Google's standard if it didn't suck balls so much and have practically no hardware support.

I'm no codec hacker, but I thought the whole point about all of this so-called "hardware" support was that it wasn't actually baked into silicon, but was low-level code that could be loaded onto DSPs. AFAIK google has 14 vendors working on hardware support, so it's just going to take a little time for that to make it to market.

And yes, it sounds like the VP8 codec needs ongoing help to get it whipped into shape. But given that people like a few FFMpeg developers have written much faster decoders than the reference one, it sounds like that work is well underway.

so you're saying an x264 development blog by an x264 developer is going to be biased against vp8, has been quoted a million times, and has no real world tests (there are real world tests out there). color me surprised! /sarcasm.

Here a real article, trollop.

Saying that H264 is better or worse than vp8 shows straight up ignorance because they both have specific scenarios which they cater to. To avoid recognizing that is a lie.

In the real world, studies have shown the two perform quite similarly, actually. Also, at the rate VP8 adoption is going MPEG is going to have to sue a lot of people, and they're going to lose in public image among other things.

>MPEG LA doesn't forbid sharing of anything.

Yes, it DOES.

If you have enough "subscribers" if you do not charge per download (over 100,000) you MUST PAY A LICENSE FEE. And these fees are much steeper than Over-The-Air video, because the Internet is somehow special.

If you make video LONGER THAN 12 MINUTES and distribute it you must pay 2% royalties *or* 2 cents per movie, whichever is greater. If your home movie becomes popular and is more than 12 minutes and you have not paid your two cents per download (even if you do not charge for it!) and they take notice of it, you will soon see the sky blacken with lawyers.

Beyond participation fees for indirect revenue (revenue not directly from the user), MPEG LA also sets out amounts for title-by-title (rental or per-view). For videos less than 12 minutes long, there is no royalty; but for videos beyond 12 minutes in length, the amounts are decided at 2% of the retail price paid to the licensee or 2 cents per title. The retail price is specifically noted as a "first arms length" transaction, specifically between the end user and the seller of on-demand, pay-per-view, and electronic downloads to end users.

If your video is longer than 12 minutes, MPEG-LA has its hooks in your content whether you like it or not. Even if it's a home movie of your kids that is 13 minutes long, you owe MPEG-LA money if you "broadcast" it over the Internet. Even if you give it away, the minimum charge is 2 cents per download as described above.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-H.264-Licensing-Labyrinth-65403.aspx

--
BMO

According to the article here, MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn said this (emphasis mine):

In addition, no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free. Virtually all codecs are based on patented technology, and many of the essential patents may be the same as those that are essential to AVC/H.264. Therefore, users should be aware that a license and payment of applicable royalties is likely required to use these technologies developed by others, too.

When asked directly about the MPEG patent holders:

Ozer: It sounds like you are saying that some of your patent holders own patents that are used in Ogg. Is that correct?

Horn: We believe that there are patent holders who do.

Okay, Horn: Who are the patent holders and what the patent numbers?

Ozer: It sounds like you’ll be coming out and basically saying that to use Ogg, you need to license it from MPEG LA. Is that correct?

Horn: That is not what we said. We said no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free.

Ummmm... You're just spreading FUD and trying to be coy about it. But you just look like a smarmy used-car salesman. I call bullshit.

I have a good deal of respect for people like Monty who get this kind of shit thrown at them day-in and day-out from whatever weak-willed, money-over-morals, cardboard-cutout figurehead the MPEG-LA props up today to go and do their dirty work.

Mr. Horn, your arguments are hollow and your acts of fear-mongering are unbecoming of any man. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call your actions reprehensible had you not graduated from Yale and then gone on to get a J.D. from Columbia. I mean, honestly, is the quantity of cash they're throwing at you so large that you can pile it on top of your morals like steel weights in a flower press, keeping your inner sense of honor pressed down so it doesn't jump up and kick your ass for being a manipulative and deceitful businessman?

Show us the patents or shut up.