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AOL Developing Cheap Switch for Audio Streaming
legaleagll writes: "According to a Fortune magazine article and a follow-up article on ZDNet, AOL is developing a cheap switch that can handle streaming audio for 10,000 users, versus current technology of 100 - 1,000 users per box depending on expense of system. The code name for the product is Ultravox and was apparantly spurred into existence because RealNetworks is now offering internet service for cheaper than AOL. I'm a little skeptical because I'm not sure how the use of an intelligent router would eliminate the need for the expensive systems to stream the audio. Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?"
I think Midge Ure might have something to say about that!
The problems with streaming don't seem to me to be the capacity of the streaming boxes, but the bandwidth and legal problems. Faster hardware is nice, but the streaming costs are still going to be too high.
Phase 1: AOL develops the Super Audio Switcher 2000 - let your whole business listen to the music you would normally pipe through the company speakers at once! Want cool hold music? Just plug the SAS2000 into your PBX!
Phase 2: Hello, we're lawyers from AOL. Seems that your business has been streaming Time Warner music without our official permission. You now owe use $1,000,000,000 dollars - or your entire company, whichever is greater.
(Please note: the above is "sarcasm", and is not meant to reflect a real world situation. Please turn "cluelessesness" switch to "off" when reading this post. That you.
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"I'm not sure how the use of an intelligent router would eliminate the need for the expensive systems to stream the audio. Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?"
I'm assuming that for these big operations that have multiple sites for streaming, it works something like this: You have a source for the stream, which no end-users ever touch. The job for this machine is to feed the routers, which can be in various areas of the world or whatever. That way each router has a dedicated "in" stream so that it can feed the masses. In a smaller operation where multiple sites aren't needed, this piece of hardware isn't needed either, so this thing actually does save money for an establishment that can take advantage of it's potential.
"I'm not sure how the use of an intelligent router would eliminate the need for the expensive systems to stream the audio."
Currently 1000 users == 1000 streams. An intelligent switch looks at the content, says broadcast one stream to the 1000 users. Sounds simple. Not, though. Check articles on "Layer 4" switches.
I'm not sure how the use of an intelligent router would eliminate the need for the expensive systems to stream the audio. Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?
My guess? This is a smart cacheing system.
The ZDnet article makes much reference to bandwidth congestion as a major stumbling block to streaming media. As a user will always get the same data back when requesting a media stream, you could set up smart router/proxies to cache, oh, the first few blocks of all media clips and the entire contents of the last N requested clips (up to a space limit). Assuming many users are listening to the same clip in the same general timeframe, you only have to stream the clip to the cacheing router once (instead of many times), saving bandwidth and load on your source box. Non-media traffic is routed as usual.
Or this could be something completely different. But a smart router/transparent proxy type of deal seems to be the most beneficial thing to develop.
Why develop propietary switches and fileformats when all that is required is a full implementation of multicast (which is just a part of IP)?
Everytime I hear about streaming media again, I think back to the mbone. Why give a stream to every single user when you can intelligently stream media using the very thing that makes the internet what it is, it's ability to route packets to their destination? Why should I have to send out 1000 copies of the *same damn thing* over my wire when I could just send one copy and let the routers send copies to subnets that are going to use it?
Whatever happened to the mbone!?!?!?!?
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While niether article has anything technical I have worked in this industry for awhile now. I'm going to assume some things first off this is primarly for live streams only or simulated live as a router has no place mucking with vod streams it dosent have the memory to help besides some QOS things. OK now assuming it's live the best way to get the data out is multicast it but unfortunatly the Tier 1 ISP's cant figure out how to bill for Mcast and it dosent reach far enough like past an ISP and nearly never to anything like dialup or broadband it's a college toy. Now insert a router that can take multicast live streams and do a unicast conversion (it's not much harder than nat and just about everything that can load Cisco IOS can run NAT) Now that changes the math on the head end the servers only need to support the stream 1 time and the additional connections for authentication (non scalable multicast as real would term it) this would be a wonderfull thing to the source people and the end user (especialy if the cable head ends can convert back to multicast) and AOL has the size to get the teir 1's to play ball AOL is a huge installed base.
But like I said this is all conjecture on my part. It may just be them whalking the arrowpoint boxes again they are routers of sorts (load ballancers realy) that can accept drive space.
No sir I dont like it.
AOL already has the broadcasting infrastructure and the reciever infrastructure. Shoutcast uses streaming mp3s which do stream very well considering its not the best compression out there anymore. Winamp is probably still one of the best mp3 players out there.
The problem of course, if they want to kill real audio, is that AOL does NOT have the infrastructure to do video. Others might say the problem is that all this is bottled up in the mess which is currently time-warner. The company which bought up all the tools to destroy microsoft then failed to develop them.
But all this is a moot point because a sizable percentage of people haven't used any real audio product or service in ages because microsoft's media player is adaquate, free, and doesn't require installtion (since it's bundled with the os) or navigating past the "pay for something you already have!" screens to get to the "free" player.
Real audio is a dying format. All AOL has to do is either buy the company (doubtful given the current economic climate at time warner) or simply throw their support to quicktime or windows media. Eventually real audio will go the way of so many other dot.coms that tried to play in microsoft's sandbox.
Feel sorry for the network guys...having to listen to "You've got sound!" all day from one or more of these routers would probably get rather annoying...
--mh
This is just another futile attempt from AOL to grab on to the and I quote "millions and millions" of people who got wise to their crap.
That's "billions and billions" and if you're going to quote Carl Sagan like that, you should at least give him credit!
oh, wait a minute... :)
GMD
watch this
Last I checked the two biggest problems with massive streaming audio were 1) the high cost of a real audio license, and 2) the high cost of bandwidth. The latter might not be a problem for AOL . But the former is.
AOL could be writing this switch to use MPEG-4 which would solve both problems to some degree. Consider also how much money AOL has to put into this project. The ROI could be huge.
I am not a streaming media expert but I do know routers and gateways.
This could speed up streaming media because the bigest limitation on SM is handling very large IP stacks of high-bandwidth connections. Dedicated hardware which does not have the overhead of OS and general-purpose software can handle a lot more connections. In addition, it would probably run cooler and fit into a 1U rackspace.
Those features should make it desireable to any ISP who provides streaming media.
Throw in 4GB of ram and each 1U server could probably handle most if not all of the average ISP's SM content cached.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Apple claims that their QuickTime Streaming Server can send 4000 silultaneous streams. That's a lot more than 100 to 1000.
It's also available as an open-souce project, depending on your exact definition of open-source (not Free for all uses, apparantly).
Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?"
Yep, but if the box is streaming the same exact stream to lots of users, it could save a whole lot of expensive bandwidth by transmitting one copy of the stream over the long-haul backbone lines, where presumably a switch nearer to a cluster of users could transmit individual copies to the users over the "last mile".
I don't know if that's what they're really doing, but it'd be the smart thing to do. Bandwidth on the internet backbone is a lot more expensive than servers and switches.
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Some of you guys might want to look at VirginRadio's website (www.VirginRadio.com), they have a broadband stream (you've got to put in a password to access it, free reg though). The twist is, it's a peer to peer stream, they use a plugin by AllCast.
Apparently, what this plugin does is contact the server and obtain a list of listeners, it then find a listener with atleast a 100kbs upload capacity and connects to them, receiving their stream from them. You'd think there'd be lots of problems.. e.g, it'd be slow, you'd get your bandwidth sucked away, you'd get cut off randomly. Well.. no. I've been listenening for about three days now, i've been cut off only twice in that time and i've had somebody else connected to me most of that time as well and I didn't even notice it till I looked at my upload stats later in the day.
I'll put my money on this being the way to get around the problem, why does the server need to be the one to be dishing out all the bandwith? Why doesn't the server just serve the streams to other users, who in turn serve it to other users. Fairs fair.
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