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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?
destroy Slashdot?
It's well on the way - /. just isn't as relevant as it was years back.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Yes. Clearly Netflix will 'destroy the internet'.
Well, that bandwidth is what I pay my ISP for...
First, they've known this was coming for ages. P2P have been around well over a decade and everybody knew people were downloading movies and TV shows and watching them on their computer. It's just hitting bigtime mainstream now and Netflix was the first commercial entity which did it right.
Second, the 'Will Porn/Youtube/Torrents/P2P/Netflix/etc Destroy The Internet?" articles have been around for ages. The providers adapt, the technology adapts.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
... and that is 20% of the internet's bandwidth no longer available to email spammers, too.
win-win
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most ISP's in the US already have a (high) data cap. Whatever you do under that, they will not care. If there were (or are) any ISP's with "unlimited" bandwidth then they will have to change policy also to have some kind of data cap, because they do not get "unlimited" bandwidth from the people they purchase internet connectivity from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The average person has a 60gb cap in Canada. People have quickly found out that they can blow through 1/2 to 3/4's of their monthly cap in a weekend. I'm sure it'll be more interesting as winter rolls around, we like snow, hockey, and all that. But curling up to watch a movie or 4 when it's -40C and snowing out is much better fun. Especially if there's a 30% chance you're going to spend 3hrs shoveling.
But sandvine is a blight on the internet. You can happily hear about all the horror stories(look on dslreports.com) that they've inflicted on Canadians, as ISP's use their equipment to throttle just about everything. Bell enjoys using them after the last mile, before switching to outside networks, even when you're on another ISP. So regardless of what happens, you're still being throttled by bell. Rogers like using it to throttle everywhere, that they think the consumption might be too high, or where growth is outpacing their delayed upgrades.
Om, nomnomnom...
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/
Oh noes! They're taking the bandwidth! Except everyone's being paid, and its still cheaper all around per movie than using the mail. The cable companies are being paid for internet access, the entertainment owners are paid for the right to distribute the content, all the equipment is more than being paid for - and everyone is making a profit.
The fact that it's using 20% of the bandwidth isn't alarming either - a movie is a lot of web pages/email/etc., but everyone involved can afford to keep the equipment running, and do a little infrastructure expansion to get more customers needs met, all to make more profit.
This isn't the end either - the moment some form of mass entertainment can be created that legitimately requires more bandwidth, and a service provider can successfully provide that bandwidth to unseat the other service providers, then they will do that, and will likely use several times more bits per second - and by then it will be even cheaper relative to the gasoline used for mail service.
The real alarm is that this process is making other forms of entertainment less relatively appealing to the masses. The cable companies don't like playing the role of bulk service providers in a realm they prefer to be premium content providers in - and thanks to monopoly powers, they're considering providing a non-neutral-net internet service in the name of "saving bandwidth" to fight Netflix's little game.
Ryan Fenton
Excuse my trolling for karma here, but there's a good comment below that article that's worth noting (which I only remembered because I saw this article when it was first posted a while ago).
Farhad, Allow me to make one clarification on the Sandvine report cited. While the growth of Netflix has certainly been dramatic, it does not (yet) account for 90% of Internet traffic on any of the networks included in our study. Rather, As you noted correctly, we did see Netflix accounting for approximately 20% of downstream traffic in North America.
The confusion on the 90% stat probably resulted from a misreading of one of the graphs featured in our “Spotlight On: Netflix” on page 15 of our Fall Global Internet Phenomena report. The graph was accompanied with the caption “An average day for Netflix on this network, peaking at 9:30pm” This particular graph (taken from a single network in Canada) shows Netflix traffic throughout the day as a relative percentage of the peak amount of Netflix traffic. In this case, the peak was reached at 9:30pm, so the curve at that point has a value of 100%. The rest of the curve shows how Netflix traffic varies: so we see that at midnight the level of Netflix is approximately 42% of what it was at 9:30pm. In hindsight, I think we probably could have explained this better in our report.
Our Network Analytics product produces these “Time of Day” graphs so that network operators can understand how subscriber usage of various applications, services, or categories of application vary throughout a typical day. Thanks again for the interesting article.
Sincerely, Tom Donnelly, EVP Marketing, Sandvine
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
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.
Yes, using the Internet for transporting data between machines will destroy it. We must avoid using the Internet in order to save it so that it will be there for future generations to not use!
As TFA implies, selection has improved greatly over the past year or two.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
fuck back when I lived in Ontario they had a "sewer tax".. that's right you pay for the frigging sewer underneath your house in addition to your normal yearly federal and provisional tax
What, you think that pipeline is maintained for free? You think they treat your shit and dispose of it for free?
Where I live the sewers are included as a line-item in the water bill, but that’s just semantics. You’re paying for it one way or another.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
My ISP makes a point of saying it - "Streaming movies and TV shows". Right there in it's spiel. All the networks are rigged to favour it - our Last Mile is asynchronous, giving us more downstream than upstream, because they want us to be good little consumers and download content, not upload it.
And now people are making scared noises because it finally worked and people started doing it? And not just scared noises, deploying technical measures to counteract it? My ISP will throttle your connection if you download more than 750MB during "peak" hours ; exactly the time you'd want to be watching a movie. Good luck with that if the stream bandwidth exceeds your new bandwidth limit, which is very likely if it's an HD stream.
While I'm glad they are taking measures to prevent my connection grinding to a halt, I'm rather disappointed that they aren't upgrading their Last Mile enough to support it - especially as they make such a fuss about being "fibre optic" (to the cabinet, not the home, shame).
They already use akamai and in fact use them even more now. http://www.businessinsider.com/akamai-gets-more-of-netflixs-business-but-at-a-very-low-price-2010-3
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!
seriously, four billion addresses is almost enough for every man, woman and child on the planet (in 1969) to have one.
You don't honestly believe we would have more computers than people, do you?!!!
Plus, this whole electronic data processing thing is just a fad...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I have 3 people in my home and 37 computers. I have a total of 37 IP addresses inside my lan, every one of those things are a computer. the 4 BLuray players are all computers. the Two big TV's are computers, the Apple TV's are computers, the 6 NAS boxes, the 2 Crestron processors, the 4 chumbys, etc......
I only need 1 to the world because I can use NAT. Some wackjobs think NAT is evil... I think they are wackjobs. I do not WANT most of my computers to EVER be directly on the internet. Even if I was given 10,000 Internet IP's I would still NAT and I guarantee most businesses will as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Don't worry, movie executives are working to close this hole as soon as possible:
Studios May Delay Netflix/Redbox Movie Rentals Even Longer; Offer Fewer Watch Instantly Choices on Netflix
http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/11/03/movie-studios-delay-rentals-fewer-choices-watch-instantly-time-warner-premium-vod-2/
That was a close call -- for a while, people have been able to get the content they want how they want it, but the industry is taking appropriate steps to end that and make sure that consumers can only view content when the industry wants them to and how the industry wants them to.
Deep-packet inspection has to be made illegal globally or they will continue to push to exploit it.
Deep packet inspection should be made legal everywhere, so everybody is pushed into encrypting everything all the time. Global adoption of encryption is a far better protection from privacy invasions like deep packet inspection than a piece of paper. Innovation before legislation, please.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
1990's: "Spam email is using up all the available bandwidth."
2000's: "P2P file-sharing is using up all the available bandwidth."
2010's: "Netflix is using up all the available bandwidth."
Somehow the internet survived and will continue to do so.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I note you have no video game consoles, and so I assume further that you rarely play games on the internet, and moreover your 4 BluRay players suggets you rarely torrent either.
In short, it's no surprise you don't see the downsides of NAT. Meanwhile the rest of us who do required user level end-to-end net connectivity know that NAT is the devil and needs to die for the sake of the web. When you find yourself unable to use the latest applications and/or protocols, you will come to realize this too.
May the Maths Be with you!