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Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers
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?"
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?
It's called multicasting. If anyone actually supported it, life would be great. We use it internally for live video and it's great.
Hollywood hasn't soured on BitTorrent itself, only a bunch of w4r3z tracking sites.
... multicast and proxy technology that we have spent the last 10+ years working on to solve this problem?
Why can't they make a non-viewable DRM'ed version freely available for P2P, but then offer the keys needed to view the media through a direct download model? How is this not the best of both worlds?
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
"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.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Content creators and content consumers are becoming one and the same. You can see this every day on sites like Jamendo and Flickr.
Can we just get it over with and get a cringely section? I really, really don't fucking want to have to be continually bothered with the verbal diahhrea of an idiot who's given a nationally syndicated column and then uses it to do dumb shit like write an entire article about multicast concepts and practices without realizing they were invented 15 years ago.
I'm sure someone, somewhere on slashdot actually wants to see and comment on whatever train wreck cringely has created this week, and that's fine. Therefore I wish to propose this: Create a specific slashdot section for Cringely and John Dvorak. Call it "pundits with sub-human intelligence", or PWSHI for short. That way, slashdot can continue to post articles about whatever trainwreck Cringely and/or Dvorak have started this week, and I can block them in my slashdot preferences, and everyone is happy.
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. 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 with copy protection as far as I know, so maybe the DRM is unnecessary for broadcasts with commercials?
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.
I actually proposed a very simple solution to this problem recently in my blog post http://auzy.blogspot.com/2006/02/auzys-technology- predictionswishlist.html
If they add support for multiple href's in a a href tag, such as <a href="http://mirror1/..." a href="http://mirror2/...">Link</a> then it would open up the possibilities of doing P2P type webserving, as the users could run a program to announce the address of their computer to the webserver after they got the download, and the webserver could give each user a long list of a href's which the client could download simultaneously off a few for larger files. It would also make having a list of mirrors for a file easier to manage, instead of posting 30 links on a page.
It really is a simple problem to solve even now effortlessly, and its only a matter of time until browsers start adding support for such a mechanism.
The subject here seems to be "TV-like" streaming, which is just pushing out streaming already-rendered video files.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/
Just one reason why the BBC is better that any media companies in the US (imo).
From what I've seen of US tv, if I lived there I wouldn't bother with a TV, and if you think I'm being anti-US, I also have to say that watching German, French, Swiss and Italian TV whilst on holiday in Europe convinced me I wouldn't bother with a tv if I lived their either.
That's not to say the BBC is the only good quality tv provider in the UK, we also have providers such as Channel 4, but then again, they are also part publicly funded...
P.S. I'm not sure if by network providers you meant the ISPs, but if that is the case then I ought to point out that the BBC is peering directly with other ISPs at LINX in London and this should benefit both sides as the bandwidth required for multicasing should be greatly reduced.
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 thinking that the RIAA or MPAA could ever get P2P working where others contribute their paid for bandwidth for these thugs to make a profit on. And for those few who do there will be plenty more like me who may go out of our way to poison the streams and keep the scheeme from working.
And before everyone gives feedback that it might work if the criminal organizations give a "discount" in return for leaving the feed up for so long, perhaps the public would indeed be stupid enough to fall for that, after all they buy songs and ringtones at insane prices in formats that lock them into DRM scheems and keep them from moving them to the next device they own. But in reality these groups will not be giving any discounts, they will just inflate the prices further and then tell people how much they "save" if they contribute bandwidth to support these rackets. Yes, maybe some people are stupid enough to fall for this, but it certainly should not be encouraged.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The Akamai figures are the embellishment of the submitter... Cringely doesn't mention Akamai anywhere in the article.
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.
the subject is what's happening now.
no assumptions about how things might be different in the future are needed or implied.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
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.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
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?
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.
... use your imagination.
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
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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?
companies like sony? oh, i trust them with media/content, fuck you very much ... no thanks, i'll pass
vodka, straight up, thank you!
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.
:) Citizens need to play hardball.
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
IT'S IS SHORT FOR IT IS FOR THE LOVE OF *FUCK* can it be that hard to get right?!?? Just say "it is" in the sentence. Does it make sense? NO? Then don't use it!
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).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The way things are going, for the most part these "execs" won't have to worry about supplying millions of people with the same stream, because there will be too much competition. It has become much easier and cheaper to produce "content". Whereas in the past, for example, you might have had a "choice" of 4 networks on TV, and those few "execs" and shows, all very expensive to produce and broadcast, now you have a choice of hundreds of stations on cable or satellite, and soon, thousands or even millions on the net. Audience "viewership" numbers will fall for most programs, and rise for others, with the others being new and for the most part out of those 'concerned execs' hands or influence or "worry".
"Consumers" aren't limited as much as they used to be, and those remaining limitations are dropping daily. A show in the near future might be extremely lucky to only have a thousand viewers (whatever, see "podcasts"), something that could be handled easily with todays "normal" streaming tech.
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 something stupid the govt people think up of based on MONEY WE NEED / something calculable.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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/
> 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...
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It wouldnt take 18mbs for HDTV, you could do it using H.264 and only use say, 1-2mbs max. (based on 400kbs at 720x320 * 4 = 1400x600 at 1.6mbs)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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!)
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Interesting BBC streaming stats. They peak at 129,000 streams. And that's just one client that got one big pipe and buy some extra from Akamai. So, you're correct... the intro is utter hogwash.
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 Internet2. I can tell you from my own experience that it works as advertized (on I2)
Mentioned at Dslreports.com
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/72293
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.
--
make install -not war
And the obvious follow up question is: why not if they want it?
Or maybe media companies just don't want a working online model instead of overloaded Akamai servers?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
BitTorrent is peer to peer. Having said that, the BitTorrent as it stands, is drastically unsuitable for use in a streaming enviornment. It is designed to transfer files, not stream them in real time; we can start with the requirement that the server has the entire file to generate the .torrent file from (try that on a live video stream, for example), and continue with the lack of an guaranteed arrival order or time. Oh, and that .torrent file - still going to be hard for a few million users to grab at once.
A BitTorrent-like protocol could be used, something that sends the stream meta data as signed packets along with the stream itself, although actually ensuring in-order and on-time delivery is still going to be a massive headache. There are all sorts of interesting and complex trips that could be used, mostly focusing on a BitTorrent-like protocol to allow trivial proxying (so an ISP could buy a few computers, hook them up to their network, subscribe to the most popular streams, and their subscribers would automatically find and use them, as they would have high bandwidth to them).
Someone want to remind me what was wrong with multicast, though?
Just gotta warm up the OC-3072 or get Hitachi to cram more lambdas into a single fiber.
They'll give you all you can watch Pauly Shore movies!!!!
Oh. Wait....
Truly informed consent, I imagine, is something the content owners will try to avoid. My prediction is that there will be an "application" you install in order to watch streamed content. You click an EULA button in the process of installing it. In doing so, you "agree" to become a peer in the content distribution network.
Of course, most people wouldn't read the EULA, or afterward understand why their network lights blink sometimes, and their disk spins occasionally.
P2P video distribution is already here.
http://www.nft-tv.com/
They are already up and running.
"640K should be enough for everybody"
IPv4 multicast across the Internet will never happen.
The reason is the complexity involved in deployment (multiple protocols, MBGP, MSDP, etc.) and that you have the 'third-party problem'. Basically both transmitters and receivers have to rely on a third-party for a redezvous-point.
Scalable Internet wide multicast deployment *might* happen with IPv6 because some of the issues have been solved (using, for example, embedable rendevous points - negating the need the 3rd parties). However if you look at how ISPs are architectured with xDSL networks, there isn't any incentive to provide multicast at the tail end.
C'mon now, that was back in the day when everybody thought we'd be in colonies on the moon by 2000.
NASA sure showed them though.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
The people selling bandwidth don't want to deploy it.
At least that's what I've heard and it makes sense. Maybe the market pressures that cause power companies to give you rebates on EnergyStar gear could come into play.
Or maybe a media enterprise will gobble up a tier one provider and make it happen to make multicast TV happen for their customers.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'll be happy to join their "P2P" network, buy the content for a reasponable price, and share pieces of files I download to other users that want the same thing. However, their litigious and moneygrubbing attitude makes me NOT want to share any of my bandwidth with them for free. They would have to offer me a monetary incentive to consider using my bandwidth to P2P it. If they want to be the type of association that is convicted of price fixing, and they want to sue everyone under the sun, I have no intention of helping them by sharing my bandwidth. They will get nothing free from me.
Others will take it much further, crack the DRM on the files, and re-share the files on the free networks right after they're released.
Does Apple sue people like this for stripping off the DRM or whatever? If they do, I guess they don't get hardly as much press, because I never hear about it. Even if they do sue, I doubt they send out blanket subpoenas to everyone and their grandmother. Apple has sold a billion legal song downloads because they make it easy, cheap, and fast to get what you want. The iTunes store doesn't treat their customers like criminals and enemies. Even if they don't say it, I think Apple's DRM is a placebo for the record companies -- easily circumvented. I think they understand the real basic truth to sales: Sell something at a reasonable price, treat your customer nicely, and they're more likely to buy the product instead of steal.
Be nice to your customers. Stop this HDCP, CSS, pricefixing, and lawsuit moneygrubbing and maybe things will work better for you.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
That's assuming that Hollywood hasn't worn out its welcome with users, which it has in spades. I think the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by users, who will watch content owned and created by users, and BitTorrent is a great distribution method for it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
It's Comcast/SBC and other ISP able to handle the network load between 7pm and 11pm
Try DSL/Cable in SF Bay area - want to see network lag?
Want to see user complaints? visit www.dslreports.com
This problem has been well known forever. It was a key factor in the failure of internet set top boxes in the mid-nineties (when everyone was trying to make one, like Apple or Oracle/Liberate).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It's still much cheaper and easier than it was a few decades ago, especially in getting your production *broadcast* out to the potential viewers. No comparison. In the US when I was a kid there was ABC, NBC, CBS and a little weird educational programming, not even like PBS is now and that's it. It ALL poofed at midnight, test pattern ville on the 9 inch philco room heater... There wasn't even UHF broadcast then, let alone cable or satellite. I remember we were the first on the block to get a TV and all the neighbors would come over and watch it some nights. It was definetly only the very rich corps who did any TV shows then, and very limited. Now look at it today, all the liitle niche shows on cable, etc, now extrapolate just a few years into the future a little as affordable broadband penetrates more....
Going to be a LOT more shows out there, so it must be "affordable enough". Maybe not dirt cheap, but when you can drop an industry from where it used to cost millions for a show and now down to the thousands, that's an order of magnitude cheaper. As to human wages, meh, same as everything else, you can get fantastic for free or a few bucks or utter crap for a million bucks, and everything humanly possible in between.. that's a crapshoot that will never change.
OK, look at just word publishing, the progression..a few monks could write, very expensive paper, they had to be subsidised by kings and taxes and tithes. thousand years later we had the printing press, now people could afford at least a few books and a lot more took up reading..and writing. another hundred years, now you are talking, books are everywhere, writing has exploded. Now, today, EGADZOOKS there's a LOT of writers out there, must be millions on the planet earth now-yet still only a small handful percentage wise do it all the time or make all their money from it. It still happens though, doesn't it? Humans just *like* being creative and will do it regardless of pay, or just for very cheap pay, if it's something they want to do.
It'll be the same with video, and TV shows and movies and documentaries and "newscasts" and whatnot. They'll be more of them, a lot more. The tech makes it possible, just like it did with writing and making music..
Does any one know whether something like multicasting / IGMP would be useful for these things?
multicasting
oh killler mbone apps where art though
back in the day we didnt have no old school
Point 1: What is the point of streaming in the first place? The idea is STUPID and NOT what I as a (ab)user want. I want to be able to have the file, copy it to the device I want to view it on, pause when I feel like taking a break, start playing when I want to and so on. I want a +-700 MB avi divx file.
Point 2: BitTorrent allows you to add seeds to the torrent as you feel like. When I read "data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data." I ask the simple question: Really? Data centers can just fine serve 300 million concurrent streams of (bittorrent) data. However, I don't have 300 million users to stream to. Get me that and I'll prove my point. No problem.
Point 3: "Streaming" is about control: Controlling that you as a user have no freedom. Freedom is good for you. Being able to download the avi files is good for you. If Akamai can't serve 150,000 concurrent users then they really should ask themselves why they insist on "streaming" in the first place instead of distributing files like they should be doing and thus allowing their users more freedom.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
A hybrid streaming/P2P application where bittorrent attempts to give you the bits in the correct order, but when it fails, a centralized server gives you what you need? Wouldn't be perfect, but it would take off a lot of the load from the server...
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
I've been playing around with this service lately: http://www.pplive.com/. It works relatively well -- I'm sure that it would work a lot better for me if there were more North American users. Apparently a lot of soccer ("football") fans use it. There are a couple dozen p2p streams of Chinese TV and radio. If only there were a few more English stations. =)
The client looked a little sketchy at first, so I have been running it in a VMWare client. But that was me being rather paranoid.
Streams take a while to buffer. Plus, it's tougher than regular P2P because the data expires after a minute or two (it's a live stream, remember). So it really depends on your upstream bandwidth. If you can't upload at least enough for 1 other person, you're a drain on the network! And, like BT, you're relying on charity if you're not pulling your own weight. My max upstream is around 300kbps - barely enough to do a 1:1 ul/dl raio. A lot of the time I'm depending on charity of others who have more upstream, and when bandwidth is scarce, I just can't get a stable stream.
Oh, if you want to give it a try, CCTV4 is the state sponsored English language station.
Remember back in the day when you could sniff your neighbohr's packets because all of the local cable modems shared the same segment? After all, the cable network at the lowest level is just a bunch of houses sharing the same copper line.
Wouldn't this be then an ideal solution to distributing broadcast content? It would be exactly like today's premium channels, where everyone receives the data, but only some can decrypt it.
I know that today, you can't sniff on the segment anymore, but I think that is due to the modem blocking out all other packets except yours, since the physical infrastructure of the cable system has not changed. AFAIK, it is still not point-to-point like the phone network, but I might be wrong.
This is coming from someone who already pays for cable TV.
Streaming multicast video from local networks? It'd be like having my own satellite feed. CNN Pipeline and other current video-on-demand stuff is a weak attempt; unambitious and ultimately flawed in execution.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
What we really should be doing is finding home grown HDTV applications. The HDTV specs are wonderful... alternate chanels, ditatal sound, time & date codes, data feeds, captions, ratings, all thrown into a digital signal if you want to do something else really cool. We need to start community/internet based HD efforts because it's obvious the big media isn't going to do it willingly. With PVRs and the internet, we could simply stream the HD content off the waves and watch it whenever we wanted.... who cares about schedules anymore anyway?
I am, and let me tell you, it's a lot more satisfying than arguing about this kind of shit.
Off I go.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Exactly how are you going to get a P4 3Ghz to serve up 110MB/sec sustained transfer from ordinary hard drive(s)? Backup system for 10,000 $2000 servers Network administrators for said facility Rental / building costs, office-space, utilities, security systems, security gaurds, etc. Electricity / year? What kind of PSU are you using / what is average wattage loads on these servers? Air conditioning, special catastrophe protection, off-site backup system, etc. Just to throw one number out... assuming 110 watt power draw (which is probably conservative) for these power servers that are going to push 110MB/sec sustained 24x7,10,000 servers would cost about $1,200,000.00 / year @ 110 watt power draw with 80% efficient PSUs (assuming $0.09 / kwh as national US average electricity rate). Then let's throw in cooling systems to keep that server room nice and chilly, and at least a few million in wages for the administrators and techs. Another couple million a year in replacement hardware... rental of the building....... The points is, 10K servers isn't just 10K * $2000. It's more like 10K * $7000. Oh, did you forget software licensing costs too?
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
In the uk where BT rule the DSL market home multicast via an ISP has to be converted to unicast at their core because BT do not have multicast enabled DSLAMs. Many of the LLU companies now have multicast capable DSLAMs so for them it is in their interests to provide multicast to home users (and then charge them for the stream) allowing much better use of their bandwdith.
Of course, Universities on SuperJanet have access to multicast streams from the BBC and various others. It is a service that now I'd miss a lot.
I already postulated a better server architecture than actual P4s: a SAN more directly coupled to the routers, with more dedicated video hardware. The P4 costs are just a basis for multiplying scale - they're not the actual hardware to use. And 60K "server units" would be distributed around the Net, with lower electric costs in many places, especially in bulk, with greater efficiencies in the actual denser HW installations. Even at $10K per server, that's not much compared to $5K:mo for 1Gbps bandwidth to the server, so the difference in cost is largely negligible. And the couple of million in staffing costs are similarly within the margin of error of my very round numbers, which wind up talking about $250M:year in bandwidth costs. As for software licensing, that's a whole other question thatn the one we're discussing. Though I'd expect the server operation to produce it's own software, likely based on Linux, because no such system exists today. Just like Akamai did themselves.
The real cost is the cost of the content. Either just media or interactive apps. But again, that's not what we're discussing. When we're talking about a system that serves a billion people, a few hundred million a year isn't too much - it's the revenue from just one hit movie that most of them would never see.
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make install -not war
Cringely States The Obvious.
The industry has been bleating about P2P for on-demand for years. It's the perfect solution for cable operators who have networks designed around INTERNAL traffic and pushing data around to subscribers. If the subscribers share the networking and you can have a city block feeding itself..
So much for those unexpected spikes in bandwidth that a company like Gridnetworks should be able to handle.
Oh, and props need to go out to Gridnetworks for one of the more amusing netbusinesspeak verbal cluster-fucks I've seen in quite a long while. From their "solutions" page: The monetization of media via the Internet requires the involvement of many specialties. Original content creators, distributors, aggregators, site designers and integrators, hardware and software vendors, hosting and bandwidth providers, user support specialists...the list goes on. For most, Internet content distribution has remained an expensive and complex proposition -- relatively few companies have married all of these moving parts to create a predictable, efficient 'content monitization engine.' The GridNetworks PowerGrid Platform(TM) was designed to address many key shortcomings of Internet content distribution and provide a means by which everyone in the value chain can easily participate in the success of each venture. PowerGrid is truly an end to end solution that is versatile at every level and every component."
Versatile until mentioned on Slashdot. I see.
This uses peer to peer, anything thats broadcast on tv can be viewed online for a week afterwards- but it is free (at point of use).
Uhh.. Datacenters have way more bandwidth cabability than an end node DSL off an oversubscribed DSLAM.
Maybe it's old news, but I saw it first two days ago:
;-)
Democracy - Internet TV Platform
Out of curiosity (it's not like I watch much TV anymore, anyway) I'm giving it a try right now. Can't say much about the contents yet (about three hundred something channels right now, some look like video podcasts, some other apparently not working). On the strictly technical side, seems to work.
Should we tell Cringely?
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
Isn't it great when a PR person's babble gets slashdotted by some "Anonymous Coward". Slashdot is the new voice of The Man.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently,
It seems that even a non-native Finn would make a better editor than the paid natives here.
Maybe if some Google VPN was to evolve, multicast could be deployed without the broadband suppliers implementing it?
Very interesting. Their portable data centers might be close enough to the last mile to make it feasible, provided they peer efficiently.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Has anyone considered using multicast streams to distribute content?
IPV6
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
Wouldn't variable bit rate be a solution? Newscasts etc could be done at 1mbit/s popping up to 4mbit/s for scene changes/live footage etc, while 'action' shows (sport etc) where codecs don't go so well with constantly changing content could use 2mbit/s up to 6mbit/s. Admittedly, sports would probably be in highest demand.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
...setup a Tor node!
submissions should be automatically disqualified and editors should be fired for linking to cringely...
Equally shallow: TV is too boring, so what.
Just say no to license servers!!