Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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...
"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.
Not everyone in the world is stuck in a backwards third world in denial shithole.
Hey, our infrastructure might be falling apart, our education system is an intentionally inadequate rote memorization nightmare, and we recently had a bloodless coup by the corporations (which wasn't reported on much, cause our news all comes from corporations), but at least we have McDonalds and Cable TV!
AMERICA, FUCK YEA!
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 1000s of garage bands connected to the internet have yet to put a dent in the old guard.
I wouldn't say that. Radio is on the verge of death, and more and more young persons are listening to songs I've never heard of before - stuff they pulled off the internet. There's definitely a "dent" there.
And the biggest sign things have changed? MTV stopped playing videos. That model survived until the 2000s and then died, because it was killed-off by the instant access of Youtube. Another channel called "TheTube" tried to revive music television, but it went bankrupt in 2006.
The interactive nature of internet is slowly-but-surely killing off passive forms like TV and Radio.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall