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Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
nicholasjay writes "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent."
...my ISP starts punishing me for using the Internet to do legal things that the Internet was designed for?
And yet it gets tons of page views. The bottom line is that the parent company has chosen to go more after dollars than making a niche group happy. Take from that what you will.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Remember when the internet bubble burst? People were pumping ooodles of money into fiber optic companies saying, "no matter who wins the internet race the infrastructure companies will be minting money. Remember the shovel makers made money in the gold rush than the prospectors." And when the bubble burst we had thousands and thousands of miles of fiber cables with the unused "dark" fiber strands out numbering the used strands by a huge factor. People were touting numbers as high as 1: 99 lit:dark ratio. So it should be possible to bring them on line and increase the internet bandwidth by orders of magnitude without too much of additional investment. Or so pontificating pundits were prognosticating.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
i have netflix and the streaming selection is pretty bad compared to the DVD selection. the reason is that they haven't struck deals with most content creators yet.
my cable bill is $130 a month for TV/DVR/Internet/phone and from what i've read approximately $30 of that goes to the content creators. for netflix to offer all the content there is they will probably have to raise their prices as they strike new deals for more content, especially if it will include movies and new TV shows that just played the night before.
if i wanted to dump cable i'd have to pay more for a la carte internet and more to AT&T to increase my cell phone plan to unlimited minutes. it would kill the entire deal since it makes more sense to just pay $10 a month for a DVR
and this theory is based on just he financials of striking content deals. netflix will have to pay a lot more in bandwidth costs as the amount of content increases.
i don't understand the entire streaming fad. it's only around because the cable companies are always a few years behind. with digital/HD cable what you watch on your cable box is essentially streaming except it's a lot more efficient than netflix's TCP/IP over the internet version. the cable companies just need to update their software and service selection
Never.
Netflix is not Bittorent and has a well defined source which is a commercial entity. So the ISP knows after who it needs to go. Further to this, as it is not P2P traffic Netflix itself has no choice but to grow its infrastructure if it is to retain its service level. Otherwise it will congest its links to ISPs and kill its own service offering.
So Netflix will have to start building its network infrastructure and peer with ISPs close to the user across the US and the globe.
We have already been through this. Before it was Google/Youtube destroying the Internet. Well it did not. Simply Google now has a backbone which can put most tier 1s to shame and peers with anyone anywhere.
Most importantly, the number of links and peerings will increase so the end result will be GOOD for the Internet as it will become more resilient (Assuming ISPs use local/distributed peering not just for Netflix but for the other peering).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Perhaps the solution is for ISPs to stop lying about how much bandwidth they can provide? Seriously, they charge Netflix and me to stream movies to me, if they can't provide the amount of bandwidth they're promising, then they need to do something about it.
Unfortunately that something is going to target the consumer because the government lacks the balls to tell a corporation to go fuck itself and compete for business.
You go to the big (and maybe even small) ISPs and say "We'll provide you with hardware to store Netflix movies. When customers request movies that are on there, it'll come from those, rather than our servers. We pay all the hardware costs, you save on bandwidth."
Akamai does just this. They peer with all sorts of people to get their cache engines in ISPs. At the university I work at, they came to us. The deal was they'd provide the computers (3 servers last I checked) and a switch. We set up our networking to go to those first. Net effect is when you ask for something that has been cached on there, you get it locally, rather than from one of their server farms. Keeps their bandwidth costs down, our bandwidth costs down, and increases speed. Now not everything is stored there, they host a lot of shit. I don't know how their computers decide what to keep where. Some popular things (like Microsoft updates) I think get auto cached, others I think it is based on demand. However even with just a fraction of their content cached, it makes a big difference in bandwidth.
Netflix may need to start doing the same. I mean video is the ultimate in things that could be multi-cast, except that we want it on demand. Well cache engines work well for that. Since the video never changes or gets updated you push it out when you get it, and then those serve it up to people as often as they want it.
Your intrepid reported, reporting from 1910...
Many people are reporting the growing difficulty of navigating their horses and buggies through the town streets due to the growing presence of noisy and fast moving motor cars made by Henry Ford. Predictions are that because of this obnoxious growth in motor cards that our highways will become completely unusable within 10 years!