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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
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.
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?
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.
I fail to see how childish name calling in the summary helps advance the debate.
Oh didn't you know? The real reason the US broadband lags so far behind the rest of the developed world is because they don't have the latest and greatest cisco routers!
It's not like Sweden has been able to offer 100mbit connections for years without these new very expensive routers or anything...
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)"
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.)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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"...
Alright, I live here in Backwoods, Nowhere, not far from Bumfuck, Egypt. I pay my US$70/month for a phone and 380k internet connection, and that's what I've got.
Let's say next month, or next year, all the internet routers are changed over to these new ones. Is MY connection going to be any faster? Nope. Not unless I ante up the money for a full 1Mb connection. And, that's the fastest I can get - the ISP doesn't offer any faster, and they have no competition.
The only way I'm going to get faster connections, at a reasonable price, is if someone comes in, and gives my ISP some COMPETITION!!!!
Hell, a great deal of my internet content is delivered at least partway via optic fiber, now. That doesn't help my actual download speed, one bit. I need both that infamous "last mile", and COMPETITION!!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
Hmmm, telcos, being natural monopolies, are highly regulated. Regulatory capture could be a means to raise the bar, or it could be a way to control the regulations already in place.
I can give a specific example: regulators want telcos to rent out their lines at the same rate the telcos charge themselves. Telcos don't want that, they want to price everyone else out of the business. So they spend money to change those regulations.
Name me one entity that wants to compete with the telcos in the market where telcos have a natural monopoly. Anyone trying to run additional phone lines to every single house? Thought not.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton