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Cisco's New Router — Trouble For Hollywood
Shakrai writes "Time Magazine has published an article about the impact of Cisco's new CRS-3 router on the business practices of the MAFIAA. This new router was previously mentioned here on Slashdot and is expected to alleviate internet bottlenecks that currently impede steaming video-on-demand services. Some of the highlights from the article: 'The ability to download albums and films in a matter of seconds is a harbinger of deep trouble for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which would prefer to turn the clock back, way back. ... The hard fact is that the latest developments at Cisco, Google and elsewhere may do more than kill the DVD and CD and further upset entertainment-business models that have changed little since the Mesozoic Era. With superfast streaming and downloading, indie filmmakers will soon be able to effectively distribute feature films online and promote them using social media such as Facebook and Twitter. ... Meanwhile, both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck."
THANK YOU CISCO!!!
The spelling and grammar police can kiss my ass
Its not like this is anything new... MPAA and RIAA are QQing because they are just like the newspaper industry: Behind the times and refusing to change.
Can anyone tell me why 99% of
This won't increase speed to your or my house. It wont remove bandwidth caps. All this will do is relieve congestion at the main gates.
The MPAA and the RIAA continue to use the lawyer model. They are operated by lawyers for lawyers. Remember "I would rather fight than switch"?
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I don't buy the more bandwidth equals more piracy angle at all. We already have enough bandwidth to destroy Hollywood if we wanted or if that was even possible.
The one thing that has changed more that any new pipe size is that world governments are finally taking command and control of the internet. They will shutdown the whole thing at Hollywood's request. They will require the ISPs to provide point-and-click shutdown just like they enable point-and-click spying. Hell, they will require they build anti-piracy into the CRS-3, if they don't already. And internet anonymity will be made illegal and anyone who provides such services will be shutdown or walled off the internet.
Isn't this router only three times faster than routers that previously existed? I wouldn't exactly call that a game-changing speed.
Not as long as ISPs offer most of us nothing better than high-latency 1.5 Mbit DSL, or low-rate cable. If we even get a choice of those two.
Oh, I forgot, the FCC is going to magically solve the last-mile (or last-500-feet) problem. Right, there you go.
From the summary: "steaming video-on-demand services"
Does the new router dry-clean and iron the services, too? Or do they mean "steaming" as in "pile of stuff that my dog just left behind on a cold day"?
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
I was under the impression that the backbones where these routers are used was never the "bottleneck" for streaming video and such. Isn't the connection from each user's home to the ISP more the issue? I mean its great to triple the backbone bandwidth, but is it really accurate to say doing so is going to make it easier for the average user to download movies?
The speed of most downloads is bandwidth limited by the computer it is being downloaded from, not by the network. This new router isn't going to make peer-to-peer networks noticeably faster. It's not going to make downloads from servers with thousands of concurrent connections noticeably faster either.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I think you are confusing core network and last mile. Have Terabits in available backbone bandwidth does not translate to what's delivered to the customer.
What stops them is my 10000/1000 connection that I pay $100/month to get and the additional fees (like $10/month to Netflix) to get a small selection of movies on top of that because the MPAA refuses to allow direct competition with new DVD releases.
I guarantee you that if someone did some digging they'd find serious collusion with Blockbuster and the MPAA over Redbox and thus why Redbox isn't allowed to get the cheap new release DVDs it once did. God forbid we have cheap access to movies right away. If you have to pay $6/rental for them you'll think they're worth so much more money than $1/day.
Oh nevermind, this is why I no longer go to the movies either. If it's not on Redbox for $1 or Hulu for free I'm not going to watch it. Now if only I could get the rest of the world to do that too maybe the MPAA would really be worried.
Same thing we have been saying for years: Technology advances, get over it, find a better business model or quit. Buggy whips!
The problem is, the current market doesn't need the middle man anymore. The middle man makes the media crappy and monotone to appeal for a large audience so they can make a quick buck, people want better stuff. Eventually the pendulum is going to swing back as 'indie' filmmakers trying to make a quick buck are going to be distributing their own stuff overloading the consumer with crappy, monotone media - the consumer is going to start looking at a more centralized source which will aggregate several of these media sources and filter out the bad stuff until they see the need to make a quick buck by overloading their loyal customers with crap again.
Eventually it all comes around but for now we don't need the middle man anymore. Just as we don't need buggy makers anymore but we have wanted fossil-fuel-powered buggy makers for the last few decades and the next few decades we're going to need electric-powered buggy makers. All-in-all, we need buggy's, it's just that the type and kind has changed.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The new router is just the previous model with plug-in cards that can switch 3x as much data. It's even possible to upgrade existing CRS routers without a shutdown, changing out the cards one at a time. It's a nice upgrade if you have a need for a router that big, but not that revolutionary. The revolution happened years ago, when routers got big enough that video streaming on a large scale was possible.
First the thong song and now this. Amazing!
I fail to see how childish name calling in the summary helps advance the debate.
If so, it's interesting that mainstream media is seeing what the Slashdot crowd has seen for some time now.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
NetFlix is streaming online. So is Hulu. Downloads of audio and video are available from iTunes, and, increasingly, Amazon. Sure, there are some rights issues, region issues, changes won't be made over night (get over it), but they are clearly happening. The stagnation/fear that followed in Napster's wake is ebbing considerably.
For the most part, if you want to legitimately download/stream a popular bit of mass culture from/through the Internet, you pretty much can.
The problem is that too many people want to do that and not pay for it. To keep their self-righteous indignation and justification alive, they continue to bitch that "Hollywood is not delivering stuff the way I want to get it (so I'll just take it)"
Calling them the MAFIAA puts you on the same level as those that spell Microsoft as Micro$oft. People know not to take you seriously, it's just childish.
So does this mean that we'll be able to have less expensive bandwidth and/or pipe costs in the near future? No? I didn't think so.
I find it highly unlikely this will do much more than shave the costs of operation a bit for larger organizations which might actually need something like this: hosting providers, pipe providers, colo providers, and the like. I'd say the chances are slim that the common man would gain much benefit from this change.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
the whole thing of "downloading DVD in a few seconds" is a complete nonsense. We're talking about a backbone router. You download speed is limited by the bandwidth of the either end point of your connection, whichever is slower. *That's* your major bottleneck, and not a bottleneck on a backbone.
If it improves the situation for indie filmmakers, then it can't be bad for the film industry. It may be painful for the entrenched interests, but they should be embracing that pain as a learning tool rather than amplifying it and passing it on to innocent bystanders.
I just bought DRM-free FLAC files of a new album from The Whigs, who belong to a sub-label of Sony. The music industry is slowly but surely starting to modernize and correct how they sell music. I'm sure we'll eventually see the movie industry do the same and start offering high-quality DRM-free stuff online. If anything, infrastructure upgrades like this router will just help that come sooner because their bandwidth costs will go down. I'm sure they're not happy about changing, but they don't really have a choice and I think they're finally beginning to realize that.
(Not to say I condone any of their lawsuits, privacy invasions, or other malicious shenanigans -- I wrote PeerGuardian for frak's sake.)
Adapt or die.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
"The hard fact is that the latest developments at Cisco, Google and elsewhere may do more than kill the DVD and CD and further upset entertainment-business models"
I read that as entitlement-business model the first time. Made more sense.
The only thing holding back streaming services is licensing, not technology. Content distribution networks are in every internet exchange and can deliver without clogging up backbones. The router in question is not last mile technology. The thing that would really spell trouble for Hollywood is multicasting. Think P2P, but instead of needing as much upload bandwidth as download bandwidth on average, multicast-P2P would need only as much upstream bandwidth as the fastest downloader can download to deliver the goods to all downloaders at the same time. Multicasting would also instantly make the likes of Akamai jobless. With multicasting, everybody could run a TV station from their home. Wake me when that arrives.
Dear editors,
I have been reading and posting on Slashdot for years. The reason I have stuck around for so long is that I appreciate Slashdot as a place where interesting discussions take place. There are many sites on the World Wide Web where everyone is free to comment, but Slashdot stands out from the crowds by making interesting and well-worded messages visible amid the quagmire of nonsense, insults, spam, and other noise people are bound to post to public fora.
The summary posted for this story, unfortunately, is full of slanted wording. Without wanting to defend the RIAA and the MPAA or their business practices, I will simply note that calling them "MAFIAA" or claiming their business models "have changed little since the Mesozoic Era" is not very conductive to having a civilized discussion. Since having or witnessing such a discussion is what I come to Slashdot for, summaries such as the present one are not up to the standards I like Slashdot to aspire to.
Let's have discussions based on rational arguments, so that we may all benefit from what everybody has to say. Insults buy us nothing. Moderators mod down comments that consult them, and I would like for the editors to not post summaries that contain them. If the story is interesting, someone can submit a summary without such or other noise.
Thank you for your consideration, and please keep Slashdot above the level of other fora.
Sincerely,
A Faithful Slashdotter
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I don't buy the more bandwidth equals more piracy angle at all.
Who said anything about "piracy"? If you read the summary (not even the article) you'll see this:
With superfast streaming and downloading, indie filmmakers will soon be able to effectively distribute feature films online
This is all marketing fluff, and Time gets sucked into it badly. Crisco is great at acquiring companies, but they hardly innovate much anymore. "The claim of 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system is based on a theoretical maximum of 72 interconnected CRS-3 chassis in order to achieve the 322Tbps total capacity -- this will likely never be deployed in practice due to space, power, and manageability realities," he said. "With its new T-Series chipset announced in early February, Juniper will deliver a four Terabit system in a half rack configuration while the CRS-3 requires a full rack to deliver four Terabits.' That's a real space and power savings for every unit deployed."
The only reason any innovation is being done with regard to selling copyrighted content to customers over the Internet or meeting their desires for how to use that content is that the pirates got there first.
Recall the attitude of Hollywood over fair use of DVDs (if you need to make an excerpt, do it from VHS.) Or that of the music industry with CDs (where it isn't entirely clear to them that ripping those CDs to MP3s is legal.)
If you like the fact that you can watch movies on your videogame consoles, or that you can buy DRM-free MP3s online, thank a pirate. Because without pirates you'd be paying twice as much and still be driving to the store to buy all your content on wafers.
The problem is that the US government is so short-sighted that it only sees the current crop of services as the only way to move it's economy forward so you get things like ACTA. It's to the point that making unpopular decisions about how to lock everything up that might be a thought is a fricken' national security issue. Well, any government that let itself get into that position shouldn't be asking all their friends to lock-in to their mistake. Even when we don't it's not the end of the US, I still have faith that it's CITIZENS will always find a way despite its government aiming at foot and pulling the trigger.
Shh.
The only problem here is that the companies that make up the RIAA and MPAA have put on a facade of being the producers of entertainment. It's a facade because they got into producing only after the fact, and usually what they produce can hardly be considered original or creative in any way. They are not artists.
Their original business model was distribution. The internet has opened up communication between any two people on the earth from the narrow confines of voice and fax to just about anything that can be digitized (music, images, etc, but not chairs, for example). Distribution has become a moot point, and the foundation of the business model of those companies has been yanked out from under them.
If DVDs are from the Mesozoic, peer-to-peer file sharing is not an "emerging technology." The new routers and Internet speeds you're talking about are an emerging technology; P-t-P has pretty darn well emerged. Protip: if you're going to use hyperbole for a good semi-comedic/sarcastic effect, don't mush the meanings of terms in the "straight" part. :)
The film and music industry must realize that there is a new distribution model: the online distribution.
Well, instead of HD, the MPAA should push for a 1920000*1080000 standard so it will be so large that it's not feasible to download from the line. How they are going to distributed it on disc media is a homework left for the reader.
Accept the fact MPAA! Newspaper didn't die because of the Internet, they just adopt and changes and now I see some newspaper are making money by providing access to the archive, or other link and analysis functions which is not possible with the deadwood media.
I believe you can do something more creative than suing people.
What is this business model that involves distributing movies for free via p2p and still making a buck? Selling t-shirts? It's slipping my mind right now.
Well, let's see here. The RIAA member companies, when they sign contracts with artists, typically promise some big up-front sum for a number of records to be cut in a specified amount of time-- turns out that this sum is just barely enough to cover expenses and often leaves very little for the artist/band to make a living, forcing them to recoup the difference on live tours (if they have a big enough audience) where the RIAA takes less of a cut. Meanwhile, the record companies take for themselves all reproduction and distribution rights (unless the artist was smart and insisted on keeping those rights), so they have a short leash on their artists while at the same time have the means to harass and financially destroy anyone who dares sample their wares without their express permission.
And that's the recording industry. It often gets worse in motion pictures, where big studios take the American insurance company method of cutting costs-- find every excuse known to man to avoid paying the very people who worked on their blockbuster titles.
These are the people who have the gall to say that they're losing money, and throw up bullshit numbers that essentially say "X downloads of our stuff means X*30 lost sales, therefore all internet downloaders are thieves who owe us X*30000 dollars." Really, you'd think that they'd figure out sooner that treating their own employees/contractors/customers like the filth and grime from Dirty Jobs wouldn't be such a great business strategy?
They picked a fight with a technology that can only grow stronger and faster with time. Honestly, with the new stuff Cisco and Google are putting forward, I can't help but think that this media cartel's comeuppance is here.
Don't even get me started on the authoritarian twits who run MLB and NFL...
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
The ability to download albums and films in a matter of seconds
I can do that now.... from a datacenter.
The point being Cisco's new routing equipment is so far up the food chain consumers won't *ever* know the difference.
Given Cisco can bribe their way into any deal with a viable customer, I'm still interested to hear about the chances this device has in the marketplace and its competitors.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The trouble for RIAA and MPAA are the ISPs pushing the cost of bandwidth down.
That won't be ISPs using CRS-3s.
There is faster and cheaper gear than the CRS-3 out there.
That's a nice router you got there, It would be terrible if something were to happen to it...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Coaxial cable has loads of bandwidth (in the analogue spectrum sense). On a typical modern HFC network you are talking probably 1GHz of bandwidth to the home. Now DOCSIS 2 doesn't make real good use of that as you can use only 1 6MHz channel which gives you about 38mbits total effective throughput shared among all users on the segment. However segments are getting smaller as the fibre part of the network is built out, and there is the possibility of having different kinds of users on different channels.
All that isn't a big deal though, as DOCSIS 3 is up and operational. It can bond an arbitrary number of channels together to increase bandwidth. Currently, DOCSIS modems out there can do 4 or 8 channels giving you 152-304mbps.
Also, there's going to be a lot of that cable space available rather soon. Currently you find that most of the spectrum is taken up by analogue TV. 6MHz per channel, often as much as 100 channels. 600MHz of the spectrum can go to that. In the remaining 400MHz comes all the HDTV and so on plus usually a digital version of said analogue channels these days. So, get rid of that, you've got 600MHz of space for data.
That gives you in the realm of 3.8gbps per segment.
Last mile is capable of much more than we see right now, and can be scaled up even further. The reason you don't tend to see it is the bandwidth higher up. If a cable company suddenly switched everyone over to 300mbps DOCSIS 3 service they'd get slammed. Customers wouldn't get anywhere near their supposed service because there just isn't the bandwidth for it high up stream.
If you want more speed to the house, there's got to be more speed higher up. That's just how it goes with any network. Also the more a router can handle the less the bandwidth costs. If 10gbps takes up a whole line card on a router and the router can only handle a few of those cards, it is going to be pretty expensive. If 10gbps can be packed in by the hundreds of ports, it costs a hell of a lot less.
The less bandwidth costs your ISP, the less they have to charge you for using it.
>>The problem is that too many people want to do that and not pay for it.
I agree with most of what you said, but take Netflix as you mentioned, I DO pay yet I still download movies online. I have the $16.99 a month plan (3 DVDs and unlimited watch instantly).
Here's the thing, I often download a new release rather than waiting for it in the mail. Sometimes the DVD is not available right away, but mostly because if I want to watch it tonight I have to wait for the mail.
If I want to watch that new-release, that I technically have already paid for, who cares/does it hurt if I download it and watch it before it arrives in my mail box?
I think that is a good example of people that do pay for unlimited access to all movies, but still have to spend their own time going to download them. Why does anyone care if I download it and watch it as opposed to if I wait for the disc in my mail box? I paid either way.
Fighting tech: dumb. Failing to try to get anything out of tech: dumber. Where can I buy non-DRMed high def movies? Oh, I can't; they aren't for sale at any price. Only pirates have them. What part of "not for sale at any price" meaning "$0 projected revenue" do they still fail to understand? What is even the point of fighting, if you don't yourself, want a piece of the pie? Yo, MPAA, are you sure you don't want to enter the market?
As long as these so-called "businesses" aren't selling, it's hard to see how this can "spell trouble" for them. When you have 0.00% marketshare, what can really threaten you?
This is simply the product that needs to be able to support ongoing growth in the core. It is neither revolutionary nor in fact terribly new. Juniper t1600+TXmatrix is roughly the same class of router.
Big core routers have a service life of around 5 years and the CRS-1 was introduced in 2004.
The size and complexity of the forwarding table in these mainframe style distributed router platforms is at least as important as their throughput (and speed of the slot interconnects to a non-blocking fabric is the biggest part of that). and of course that's not the part that journalists have been covering since in layman's terms it's almost completely incomprehensible. These boxes are designed for 5-10 million routes spread across a number of VRF (virtual router and forwarding) instances which is going to have to last them until 2015 or so which is potentially a fairly iffy proposition.
i thought that copyright, the basis for all media corps, can at best be traced back to the 1700s.
also, i wonder how much of the current issue is that laws, at least i parts of the world, is mixing the rights of the creator as being named as just that creator, and the issue of who can make copies. As long as this is under one set of law, one can argue for time frames to benefit the former while its real effect will be seen in relation to the latter.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
While I agree and disagree with parts of your post, I don't see a line of it that is a troll.
Someone mod him back up.
--
I think the prices are too high. You can easily drop the price of a *good* new car in under 10 years. That's insane.
I watch and listen to indie stuff, I play the service changing game (now on directv and back at $34 a month again. I cut my service repeatedly at Dish to get it down to 60 and they kept raising the price back to over $70 for less and less product).
I watch shows on the free sites (hulu, network, etc.)
There is a price point where it is more convenient to let them hold the content and serve it to me- but it's somewhere about $40 a month and they want triple that (or more).
And they've completely hijacked the copyright rules. Anything over 28 years, I don't respect. However- I keep my head on straight that it's potentially illegal so I don't act like an idiot. And there are legal ways to get a lot of copyrighted content free.
There is an increasingly large glut of entertainment now tho. I skip things all the time. I'm years behind on some shows. Which will make them cheaper when I finally watch them.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Hulu no only serves up 5 episodes of Firefly at a time, the whole show is only 12 episodes, limiting which I can watch at any given moment is just stupid. I doubt this is the desire of Hulu, and is most likely the desire of the 'rights holder' so I wont complain to hulu, but if I want to watch something legitimately and they are letting me, then what am I supposed to do?
Full disclosure: I have not pirated any of the Firefly episodes, nor have I pirated anything since college.
This headline is just wrong. Hollywood's failed business model is a threat to their own profits. It is nobody's problem, but theirs.
Isn't Time-Warner the single biggest member of both the MPAA and the RIAA? Why would anyone listen to their obviously biased opinion on this matter? The article is full of misinformation, fear, uncertainty, and doubt: just the kind of sensationalism we love here at slashdot.
First, consider the comparison made at the outset to describe the difference in scale between a home router and a CRS-3. Rather than using a neutral example, like car horsepower, an example is given which puts none other than the vicious T. Rex dinosaur in the position of the CRS-3. What is more understandable to the reader, the big violent dinosaur or the car with 1,000,000 horsepower? Of course both are equally understandable, but they give drastically different impressions.
"As it turns out, these megarouters sitting inside data centers of major telcos and cablecos are among the biggest bottlenecks of the Internet, because as bandwidth speed to end users has shot up in recent years, router technology has not kept up, resulting in traffic jams that can slow or freeze downloads."
You know you can trust TIME Magazine to report on the state of the art in core Internet statistical measurements. Need I say more? These bozos have the audacity to make such a bold claim, without even a hint of statistical data, without attribution to an outside study, without a quote by a recognized expert or even an industry insider. Am I supposed to take author Erik Heinrich's word for it? He's the guy who compares routers to geckos and T. Rexes!
The real story here should be Time-Warner's blatant use of the TIME publication to further it's corporate overlord agenda in collusion with the other members of the Big Media cartel. We'll see much more of this coming from all the usual suspects as we get nearer to a vote on ACTA.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
It's going to get very bored after the first 4 minutes. Seriously, this really highlights to me just how little content there is out there, and how much of the internet must be people fetching the same old things over and over. If there is that little content and that much capacity then maybe the content owners can justify reasonably high fees. I don't mind paying a reasonable fee to access something, I mostly abhor not being able to access things like out of print books and music to suit my arcane tastes. By all means charge for access to content, but allow access in a flexible way in return.
Nullius in verba
How the movie industry can have it's best year ever while at the same time claiming to being bled dry by file downloaders is a mystery to me. In fact the movie industry hasn't lost a thing to downloaders because downloaders aren't their customers, never have been and never will be. Yes file downloaders will consume content without paying but the industry needs to just accept that and focus on the people who are their customers. I paint watercolors and I want as many people as possible to see my work for free so I can find those few people who actually want to buy, it's them I'm focused on. When I open a show of my work I provide food and wine to everyone who attends whether they buy my work or not. The entertainment industry should adopt the same attitude and stop making their products less attractive to the people who do want to buy them.
This router won't be sold to the telco's by saying it allows for customers to get more. You're dreaming. It will be sold to telco's claiming it can gain new markets at a huge cost savings and still maintain control of the bulk rates. It also maintains control over their competitors costs and bandwidth limits. It's a win win for telco profits.
This router will perhaps ease the congestion excuse/claims made by the large providers and ISP's that actually rule the main backbones. I say claim because how much bandwidth is actually available is more of a management issue. If say the telco's were to upgrade to this router what would happen to the cost structure? The manipulation of the trunk fee structure has always been a big money maker for the telco's. This router upsets that balance. Before the telco's were able to make claims based on how much fibre was lit not how much fibre was there and just dark. In Canada at least a few years ago the telco's went dark on 60% of their fibre and I heard a report of another 40% of the remaining (See dslreports back then). Since that time I do not know if any was ever re-lit or how it relates to the so called bandwidth crunch, but it gave reason to tell the CRTC they needed to raise/control the wholesale rates if they were to increase/invest in the infrastructure. I guess the CRTC bought the argument as nothing has changed here and if anything it has become worse. The big fibre lie of 2001 (I think it was 2001 could have been 2002)
So now here they are without lighting up one single new/old fibre, just changing out some routers the telco's have 3x the bandwidth and the question is how this will effect the MPAA/RIAA business model? Well it won't change anything. It's no longer the argument about how the MPAA/RIAA can make money. That was always about the MPAA/RIAA wanting to make huge obscene amounts of money. The MPAA/RIAA won't change that desire simply because there is more bandwidth. Nor will they change their business model. There won't be anymore bandwidth available even with this router. If anything at all it will allow the telco's to turn off another 30% of their fibre backbones and still control the pricing just like before if they want too. There is nothing here to affect the MPAA/RIAA. It's not related to nor ever will this relate to the MPAA/RIAA and their desires. This is about telco's price control. It never was or ever be about anything but that.
This won't affect the indie guys either. Nothing will change for them either except for perhaps one way. Unless they sign a deal with the telcos for exclusive content. The only people that will ever get in on this supposed improvement are those that the telcos want to use for their premium content services. The rest of the world be damned. There is something new on the horizon and it is a new business plan for the telco's at the price of a few routers. Now they don't need to disclose they had the fibre all along, just sitting dark and so no risk at getting caught in the big lie about how much they physically had. Now they can keep that lie for later and yet keep the rates high for all end of line carriers, well except for their own that is. They suddenly can supply their end users with a unique service but keep the rest the status quo. The MPAA/RIAA will continue to navel gaze and throw tantrums they aren't getting $26 a movie and/or while signing backroom deals with the telco's if they want. Who's to know.
What is a more precise term to refer to both the music and film industry associations of America? Granted, it would have been more effective had it been coined before Vivendi sold Universal City Studios and Time Warner spun off Warner Music Group, but Sony is still in both organizations, and the other movie studios still distribute their soundtracks through one of these major record labels.
So does this mean that we'll be able to have less expensive bandwidth and/or pipe costs in the near future?
It will if it lets Verizon's FiOS put the screws to Comcast's Xfinity and vice versa.
MAFIAA = Music and Film Association fo America
It's not all hate speech ya know.
Funny play on words title, BTW!
I am not sure how the CRS-3 will improve my 1386 kbit/s downstream at home.
If given the choice, I would gladly take an _ancient_ 7206VXR with gigabit at home, but no one will connect me at that speed.
It's not about the backbone, it's about the curb.
So now I can exceed my monthly 60GB cap even faster now? Sweet.
The Time article mentions that one of the major distributors over which the music industry has an "iron grip" is Tower Records. Tower Records went bankrupt in 2006, and all the US retail outlets were closed. They still have some online operations, and a few stores around the world use the name, but that's it.
That part of the article leads to a point few have mentioned. The RIAA and the MPAA used to deal almost entirely with distributors who were weaker than they were - record stores, often small ones, and movie theaters. That's no longer the case. The remaining stores that sell CDs and DVDs do so as a sideline. There are DVDs in WalMart, Best Buy, Target, etc., but they're not a big fraction of the business. Online, the RIAA and MPAA have to deal with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. All of those companies are much bigger than any music industry player, and bigger than most of the film studios.
I couldn't imagine even trying to download a movie over my 1mbit connection to a crappy oversold ISP that ends up being on average 500kbit with 1-3second latency.
Which means their already minuscule audience will be minuscule audiences who can stream and download faster.
While it is true the movie, music, and book publishers need to come up with modern business plans, I think the summary wrongly implies that "both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing " for the sake of blocking peer to peer sharing.
***They want you people to stop sharing and distributing their copyrighted material without paying for it***
They embrace peer to peer systems and networks who don't steal from them.
To anyone over 40 (like me), CRS means "Can't Remember Shit".
The author is crazy. Streaming HD to the home is barely possible under the best of conditions right now. A 3x overall internet capacity increase would make this realistic and selling movies on the internet is going to make the movie companies billions. It's going to destroy some businesses but it won't be the movie companies. Personally, I think it's time for the old Qwest commercial to become reality.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Have you not been using the Internet for very long? In the time I've been on it (about 15 years) I've seen the price of bandwidth drop a significant amount. When I first got on 28.8kbps was as good as it got where I lived. That was about $20/month, plus another $20/month for a dedicated phone line. However that number was misleading, as the ISP only had about a 30k CIR frame relay connection for like 8 modems, so you rarely got the full speed. In a couple years time, that was up to 48-53kbps depending on line condition, and the ISP had enough bandwidth that you got that pretty much all the time.
When I was first able to get DSL the best available was 256k/256k and it ran me about $70/month. I was simply floored by how much better it was than dialup, and quite pleased at the price as the next better thing to dialup in the past was ISDN, which was looking in the range of $150/month for the line and then $50/month or more for the ISP.
When I moved I decided to go up to business class Internet. I got 640k/640k DSL with 5 usable IPs for about $160/month. Had that for a couple years, then switched to a different provider that got me 4mbps/768k with 8 IPs for about $150/month. Later I switched to business class cable connection as DSL has limits that can't easily be overcome. That was 10mbps/1mbps with 5 IPs for about $160/month. That got upgraded to 12/1.5mbps about a year ago for no extra charge (they just increased the speed of that class of service). Just about a month ago, they called me with a deal that gets me 15/1.5mbps (allegedly, though more like 20/2mbps in my testing) plus a phone line for about $150/month.
Seems to me that bandwidth continues to get cheaper. On my first business connection I paid about $0.25 per kbit. Now I pay a bit under $0.09 per kbit ($20/month or so is phone cost). You can do much better if you want a consumer grade connection too. 15mbps down would probably run you $50-60/month.
It's not like the price plummets on a daily basis, but as the years have gone by I see faster and faster connections being available at reasonable rates (time was 1.5mbit was over a grand for line, transport and access and anything past that was near impossible to get) and the price you pay for a given amount of speed has gone down.
The router is impressive and all but bandwidth will inevitably increase with time anyway so really it's time that is the death knell for Hollywood, not any particular bit of gear.
Shoot, our connection to the internet is down. What can we do for fun now?
Want to watch a mo... oh, shoot.
Is that they produce crap. Not that there are new distribution channels.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Really, the Internet was waiting for this router to expand? Really ?
So Cisco is telling us their customers have maxed out all the possibilities with the CSR-1/2 and couldn't expand any more ?
I doubt that this is the case. You can think of a thousand of ways to expand your network bandwidth in a scalable way.
Unfortunately, I don't live in America, moving to America is a pain in the ass, and the face of telecommunications in Canada is very different. You need larger infrastructure for fewer people.
In addition, rather than snarking at me to "go start my own business," you'll note that my plan actually says that a business that is *already* at "good enough for now" to go do it. It requires piecemeal upgrading of components in-place already. The cash layout required to *start* at that level is prohibitive. Remember, the basic version of that Cisco rack is $90k, and you'd need a few of those around the country, if you wanted to compete. The companies already existing, however, are at that point right now, and so rather than investing in "Five year plans," they should go longer-term. It's a better investiture of capital than constantly needing to cycle out equipment that becomes obsolete, rather than has actually broken down due to age. They might even be able to keep ahead of the upgrade cycle and expand the network to low population density areas, rather than constantly trying to prop up their infrastructure in urban areas that's now being excessively taxed due to increased demand.
All in all, you'll have to forgive me for dismissing YOU for being a moron, and a likely troll.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Steaming from Valve Software's?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Which is why existing telcos spend large amounts of money trying to stop others from entering the market.
Confusing economic theory with reality causes a lot of problems. Remember the old joke:
An econ professor and a student are walking across campus. The student says, "Look! a $20 on the ground."
The professor replies, "Nonsense. If there were, someone would have picked it up!"
I forget what 8 was for.
There, solved that last mile thingy for ya.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Come on Slashdot editors. Try actually editing. That kind of crap is just stupid.
This article is sensationalized garbage, it's just a router!! Why do we have to invoke a bunch of MAFIAA BS? I was disappointed in Digg when I saw this on their front page, but I wasn't surprised. When I saw this on Slashdot my jaw literally dropped, have we sunken this low?
Then I'll take this threat seriously - and not before.
Good movies take talent and collaboration of a lot of people with talent, all through the process, and they're not all going to work for an "indie" producer for rice money.
The problem is that too many people want to do that and not pay for it. To keep their self-righteous indignation and justification alive, they continue to bitch that "Hollywood is not delivering stuff the way I want to get it (so I'll just take it)"
no, the problem is not my stealing from them. it's the consideration received from my provider for providing a la carte services. for instance: cable will run you 20$ - 125$ a month for a package service of some sort or another. internet access which will stream video at far less resolution than a hd broadcast -reliably- is anywhere from 20 - 100$ a month. so we already see a convergence on pricing for 2 different flavours of similar materials using the same delivery medium in many cases, but one comes with a cap while the other wears a diaper.
the gross profiteering of monopolistic practices staring each other down is the problem.
"Meanwhile, both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck."
Well, they could just start giving away everything for free. That would work, right?
The problem is, from the average user's perspective, there are two ways to get a movie today: pay for it, or download it. Paying for it gets you a variety of different things, like a physical product, streaming from Netflix, or maybe just a rental from Blockbuster. Downloading it, if they know how, results in the movie being delivered almost as quickly for free.
So, let's see. I can pay or I can download. ... checks wallet ... I guess today I'll just download.
To the user the experience is pretty much the same as long as they know to stay away from files identified with "CAM". Maybe the download is better, because there are no previews, no ads and no warnings.
We have pretty much educated everyone under 30 that there is no ethical problem in doing this - the studios are making plenty of money (too much, in some opinions) and therefore it is all OK. It isn't like you are actually "stealing" anything anyway. And what is one or two people downloading compared to all the people that are actually paying, right? Problem with that today is the ratio of paying to downloading is getting smaller and smaller every day.
The truth is they are definitely not the bottleneck, as someone who has worked in core routing for 15 years. The real bottleneck is the 38mbps docsis2 node you share with you and your closest 200 friends.
MPAA/RIAA's next target will be Cisco, and then where will we be? No new tech, no Linksys routers, no Ellen Page ads. Buhbye Lunenburg!
For the most part, if you want to legitimately download/stream a popular bit of mass culture from/through the Internet, you pretty much can.
What other purchases are required?
I can use Hulu and I have Netflix via Roku, and lots of current releases aren't available. I have to use the mail service for them which has nasty latency.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Its been my experience that Netflix only gets a movie after it has been out a long time, after rentals, after dvd, etc...and their streaming does not stream their entire collection. Some of the biggest titles are not available to stream.
Hulu, in terms of the most popular shows, sometimes has the last few episodes, but no way to start at episode one. And many popular shows are not on Hulu. It is actually pretty limited. Not to mention the absence of British shows like Torchwood hehe.
And then there is the entire sets of some of the most popular/highest rated shows of all time on the "premium" channels like HBO. True Blood, The Wire, etc.. None of that is streamed as far as I know. Maybe much later on Netflix, I'm not sure.
Streaming is the redheaded step child of entertainment still. It might get better, but it is no where near ready to be a primary source.
And don't get me started on "too many people want to do that and not pay for it. " Thats bullshit. There is no option to pay "for it", because "it" does not exist.
The model of pay your cable bill for shows 1,2 and 3, pay your Tivo bill to record 1,2,3 and be able to pause TV, pay HBO to watch 1 show, sign up for netflix to watch movie 4,5,6, etc...
It is just too scattered, too inconvenient, and did you notice all the PAYING that is going on, and I still can't, say, find a single source to start watching Burn Notice season 1 episode 1 anywhere. Hulu, nope. Netflix, nope, etc...Or anything on discovery.
I'd gladly pay 150 bucks a month for basically the "all service". HBO/Showtime/Cable/Movies, all modern, no delays, all episodes available at all times.
The days of having to buy DVD's are (well should be) over. And the artificial scarcity model will eventually fail. Region limits too. The first big streaming company to arm wrestle content providers into giving up their content in a timely fashion, and ALL of it, not just a few episodes, is going to make major bucks.
Who knows, maybe Hulu can someday offer a 100 bucks a month service, that has all shows, including HBO/premium content/Movies.