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Proposed Standard Would Address Video Buffering
Lucas123 writes "Sony, SanDisk and several other technology providers have formed a group and proposed a standard that would use predictive software to pre-load content onto mobile devices in order to preempt buffering issues due to bandwidth bottlenecks, which industry experts say will only worsen over time. 'Intelligently coordinating content delivery in advance to local device storage lets consumers enjoy their video, games, periodicals, books and music when they're ready,' said Susan Kevorkian, a research director at IDC. The proposed standard also raises the question: do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?"
If it's coming from Sony, I'm not sure it would be particularly suitable for a standard. There's probably half a dozen potential patents there.
Howsabout this: Provide more bandwidth than a Dixie cup on a string and then buffer a bit for safety when the user actually selects content.
... eat their data quota in no time. Consequently, telcos will get enough money to pay us royalty for our patented technologies.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Are these providers going to cover the charges associated with downloading unneeded data to consumers devices?
You have a 'data quota'? What kind of a 3rd world country still has those...
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Back in those days when I had a crappy internet connection, I downloaded all video files. Sure, I had to wait some time until it was done, but at least I didn't have to wait every 10 seconds while watching the video. It's much cleaner, you can fast-forward, go backwards, watch the whole thing a second time, with no delay whatsoever. And no Flash.
I never really understood why video sites don't have a download option. It would make watching videos over a small internet connection so much better. (Then again I guess they don't want us to leave their site and watch videos without their annoying ads)
Just what the consumer wants - pre-loaded crapware ......
do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?"
It's all fun and games until you visit 4chan and get something preloaded you don't want.
Sony has formed a group and proposed a standard that would use predictive software to pre-load rootkits and spyware onto mobile devices in order to preempt content piracy issues due to increasing bandwidth, which industry experts say will only get larger. 'Intelligently coordinating rootkit delivery in advance to local device storage lets consumers enjoy their legitimate video, games, periodicals, books and music without fear of piracy,' said Susan Kevorkian, a research director at IDC.
FTFY
It's been done before & it sucks, especially on low-end devices (this is why whenever I find a Windows rig that has & will never have more than 1GB of RAM, I disable the Superfetch & readyboost services!) What they REALLY need is an intelligent distributed proxy system at every call tower where hits are tallied by region/state/nation, in that order, & pre-distributed accordingly-- pushing it to every device is just fucking retarded.
You have a 'data quota'? What kind of a 3rd world country still has those...
"Data plan for 3 or 4G mobile networks" sounds better to you?
Even on the tubez, do you think is better to have unlimited but QoS-es traffic or a limited traffic quota with no QoS?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This always seems like the equivalent of perpetual motion devices to me. How can doing more, take less time, over the same amount of bandwidth?
In soviet Canada 25GB is all anyone will ever need.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Talk about old stuff. TiVo has been around for many many years.
Also there are already good standards for doing this: RSS + torrent.
News at 11, another useless company tries to patent and grab money for a technology that has been on the market for years.
Suitably, slashdot verification word is "corpses"; they're dead, stop whipping them.
Essentially this is a web content download issue.
;)
Surely this has already been solved dozens of times before?
An example - use RSS and bittorrent. RSS feeds from content providers specify what to fetch (and could include any pertinent metadata like size, synopsis, etc) Retrieve the actual content via bittorrent - Throttle/pause transfers (or use QoS in the device) to handle the "idle time transfer" part of the deal. Heck, you might even relieve some of the bandwidth pressure this way by p2p downloading from devices on the same access system (cell, exchange, wifi point or whatever).
Another example - use a caching proxy (duh) and a published iCal calendar listing future things that may want to be cached.
Yeah I know content is terrified of the word "bittorrent" but great example of lawful use
(though there's no reason the torrented files themselves couldn't be subject to DRM, evil as it is)
I wonder - if you don't actually consent to have something pushed onto your device but it does get pushed (and that will happen eventually) - how far does your implied license to the pushed content go? Given they basically gave it to you....
Mobiles? Why not address buffering issues on fixed lines?
Oh wait, I forget the real world has great infrastructure, and not controlled by a telecoms monopoly. :'-(
You upload *to* something. You download *from* something. Got it?
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
This is just disguised PUSH tech. WE DON'T WANT IT!!!
Really. We don't want content we may or may not use sent to us on our tab. Much, much better to PULL what you want, when you want it. Better for you because it will probably be cheaper. Better for the network because it is more efficient. Even better for content providers because they can tally downloads knowing that they were actively requested (and most likely consumed) by users.
Get with the program! One of the great things about the internet is that it is on-demand, not strictly broadcast.
On a Set Top or similar system, there is almost no cost for misprediction. Assuming no bandwidth caps, free electricity, and that the prediction agent "owns" the storage that it is filling. On mobile none of these are true and I would be extremely surprised if they could come up with something useful. About the only thing you could do would be to preload ads, which is trivial and which I don't think users will go for voluntarily.
"do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?"
Yes, I'm sick and tired of waiting for a stream to download. Youtube is practically hosed all of the time.
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?
If Amazon can predict with high accuracy the stories that a user will read/watch that day, then preloading them absolutely makes sense. Especially for the use case where the device has morning wifi access, but is then going to be limited by 3g/gprs or disconnected for much of the day, or where the device user turns off wireless to save battery power. There are a bunch of tools that already do this for ebook readers - e.g. Calibre can prefetch stories from hundreds of feeds and load them up ready for the day.
How is a video based system any different from using RSS & BitTorrent, which seems to be a pretty popular way of downloading?
I don't get this. People can't wait a few seconds for buffering? A few seconds for some data from some computer that is probably hidden in a data centre somewhere, thousands of kilometers away to get turned magically into a signal that is then transported to you over the biggest computer network ever created by humanity, then it is beamed somehow to you no matter where you are - walking down the street, sitting in your car at traffic lights, or lying in bed.
I can wait a few seconds; I spend them thinking "...how the fuck!@? This is awesome!@#"
Usually, you have to order stuff (and pay for it) to have it sent to you. With this scheme, I can see some clever hacker buy a few episodes of some show, then wait for the rest to "preload" and copy them out of the storage. Unless the content providers have a smart encryption/decryption scheme this time (good luck with that ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
According to one of the linked articles they do that... scratch the above remark :-(
C - the footgun of programming languages
that checked out. Your brain may be broken or something; mine parses multiple lines of text just fine.
Caveat Utilitor
I predownload everything I want to watch.
I don't bother downloading stuff I don't want to watch, unless I'm getting something for someone else.
I don't watch commericals or have stuttering.
I typically get 720p of everything.
anyways, when it said video buffering, i thought we were talking about video buffering.
Be seeing you...
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a US Postal Service delivery truck full of Bluray Discs.
My wife and I occasionally watch Netflix streaming, but the quality is terrible, so we usually just plan ahead and get the Blurays delivered.
We get 3 at a time, and it takes a day for the movies to get to us. So, if a BRD is 50GB, that's 150GB/24 hours, which is well beyond the point where our ISP would say we've exceeded our "unlimited" usage plan and turn us off anyway.
No, especially if they're going to delete it without warning: slashdot passim
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do these experts happen to work for big telco/cable?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Zipf's law (i.e., the power laws found in media choices) means that this won't work as well as a naive calculation might indicate. Yes, you can save some bandwidth by preloading the next "Harry Potter" movie or whatever, but people's tastes are sufficiently variable that you will never be able to pre-load everything that everyone wants to watch (or even that some individual wants to watch), and so you still need enough bandwidth to supply everyone as if there wasn't preloading. It may be worth doing, but it won't fundamentally change the costs of provisioning for "bandwidth bottlenecks."
And who pays for the downloading of all that stuff that may never be used?
Mobile devices can switch off memory that isn't used, but if the device is constantly full of clutter, the device can't power off that memory.
Repeat after me: "Download from". "Upload to". Next time I catch you saying "download to", I'll have your geek card confiscated.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
"Storage technology companies propose increasing the amount of storage required on mobile devices"?
I don't read a 5 word subject heading for a half sentence comment on slashdot, so I am with DNS-n-B on this one, it's a surefire way to make sure I and others completely ignore whatever you wrote, because it looks like non-sequiterial trollery.
Provider's are dropping unlimited access left and right. It's simply indefensible to propose a technology that would quietly consume bandwidth based on a presumed future request for information.
You have a 'data quota'? What kind of a 3rd world country still has those...
"Data plan for 3 or 4G mobile networks" sounds better to you?
Even on the tubez, do you think is better to have unlimited but QoS-es traffic or a limited traffic quota with no QoS?
It is better to have the unlimited data. QoS only matters within a network you control.
Youtube is practically unusable on my iPod Touch because it seems to always grab the HD version of a video and I have to wait 5 minutes while it buffers a 2 minute video. If I browse youtube.com in Safari, I have the option of picking the SD version and can start watching it right away.
99% of the time, I'm not watching a documentary on Costa Rican rainforests. More likely, I'm trying to show my kids a funny video of a cat licking it's own butt or something else that plays perfectly in low-res. The option of picking a suitable resolution for my viewing habits would go a long way toward cutting bandwidth and buffering needs.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
A: Because the breaking of flow is not what's irritating; it's the fact that you're posting it out of order.
Oh, and PS, we get it already!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The former. Proper QoS does absolutely nothing when there is bandwidth available, and it prioritizes light, latency-sensitive and interactive traffic over bulk downloads when there is competition. Even with "no QoS", routers and switches eventually have to choose a packet to drop when queues fill up, so this choice is a false dichotomy.
Maybe you're thinking of "Evil/Stupid QoS" which penalizes destinations that don't Pay Up to the telco mafia every month. That's a horse of a different color.
I read the article in hopes of finding out how they are going to try to determine what the user will want to watch. I didn't find any information on that, it only reiterates one point over and over: network connections are slow, buffering is a pain, do it during off-peak hours
The more interesting bit, for me, would be how to determine what the user is going to (on a whim) decide to watch later on.
Maybe some people are so stuck in a rut and predictable that some algorithm would actually work, but for me I tend to get bored with stuff easily and shift from one subject area to another rather quickly so such as system would probably be worthless. The stuff I was interested in yesterday may or may not have anything to do with the stuff I'll be interested in tomorrow.
"I swear, that porn got on my phone on its own, I never put it there!"
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
FYI Teksavvy just bumped their "limited" plan to 300gb/month after scrapping the UBB.
If the CRTC's speed matching ruling ever comes into force, I'll be happy...
How about solving the real problem first: bufferbloat
Cringely talks about this in this column: http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/2011-prediction-4-bufferbloat-may-be-terrible-but-your-cable-isp-wont-fix-it/ I have comcast at home and whevever I try to use youtube it always seems like I'm waiting and waiting (on my mac and over wifi on my iphone). At work I don't seem to have this delay...
as long as we still have unlimited data plans that are affordable. Oh wait!
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but while capped connections are common in North America (especially for mobile connections), a lot of third-world countries still have unlimited plans. Usually relatively slow (in the under-3mbps range), but unlimited.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, I actually expect my 3/4G plans to be without data quotas...
- These characters were randomly selected.
They can design the system that does exactly what is says, buffers. Only it downloads 25% or 50% and when you do choose to watch it, it starts downloading the rest. Starts immediately and doesn't use up too much disk space or bandwidth downloading something that you won't be watching in the first place. The idea should work unless it takes longer to download the end than to view the beginning.
"uploading", Surely?
I never really understood why video sites don't have a download option. telcos cost much money.