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Netflix Pondering Peer-to-Peer Technology For Streaming Video
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Ars Technica have discovered evidence that Netflix is actively researching the possibility of using peer-to-peer technology to stream its videos to its customers. The evidence: a one-month old job listing seeking a software engineer with extensive experience developing and testing large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In addition: Netflix's admission of wanting to 'look at all kinds of routes.' A recent blog post by BitTorrent's CEO explains how, in a peer-to-peer architecture, 'Netflix traffic would no longer be coming from one or two places that are easy to block. Instead, it would be coming from everywhere, all at once; from addresses that were not easily identified as Netflix addresses — from addresses all across the Internet.'"
In other Netflix news, the company has "reached an agreement with three smaller cable companies that, for the first time, will let U.S. subscribers watch the streaming video service’s content as though it were an ordinary cable channel."
I'm going to charge Netflix for the rights to transit my network.
THL phish sticks
Can you see the finger raised at the US networks that got the non-netruality ruling?
I really don't see why the networks themselves were not pushing for this. With massive amounts of "common" content things like netflix can really offload top level traffic by peering.
could it also be used to just sync data between data centers and not really be full peer to peer?
the draconic powers that provide the content to netflix probably dont like it that you have a copy of a product on your drive even if its encrypted.
"The Net interprets Comcast as damage and routes around it."
Have gnu, will travel.
At least on new GoT nights this would really help.
Seriously, I already have problems keeping my connection below my monthly cap (60 GB combined up/down). I don't want to share it with other subscribers.
Try it! Library of Babel
So now that the FCC drops net neutrality, Netflix is going to play ball with the ISPs? They've basically been DOSing the ISPs local loops for nearly a decade, blaming the ISPs and now they have the brilliant idea that maybe they should address the insane amount of bandwidth they're eating up? How much do you want to bet they stop being such assholes about peering agreements now as well? Maybe a client that caches data to? Who came up with these brilliant cost saving ideas?!?!
I fully support net neutrality but Netflix is the primary reason the FCC dropped it. I would have much preferred that they passed regulations requiring content providers to work in good faith with ISPs to ensure they were using data in the most efficient way possible (which is how almost everyone else behaves naturally) but instead we had this profit hungry company back the FCC into a corner until they took the easy way out. Instead of sharing the sandbox, it's now whomever has the most moneys sandbox. Thanks netflix.
Unless they are going to reimburse customers for the extra bandwidth that the use because they are also transmitting, all this is going to do is inconvenience a lot of people as they hit their monthly caps a lot sooner... because they could now transmitting a lot of what they receive, which basically means that counting both uploading and downloading traffic, their usage will almost double.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
back in the early/mid 2000's for my radio station when my Shoutcast provider disapeared. I used http://www.streamerp2p.com/ and there was also later Peercast. The streamerp2p actually worked ok but this came at a time when I lost interest in streaming with alll the laws and OMFG those geeks in their basements with their radio stations are starving the artists hysteria was in full swing. Too bad had my station up to 24 people listening at a time.
I was going to start streaming video using Peercast with their p2ptv but never got around to that.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
In lots of places in US Internet is Metered. Even in my neck of the woods I start getting nasty letters at 300 GB down, let alone up. Most people use very little upload bandwidth, and you can be the ISPs would notice if they started bitorrenting all their Netflix traffic. This isn't going to happen.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
i tried popcorn time , and it works well with more than 6mbits, but not under that.
Split the ISP's from the content providers and maybe North America won't be stuck in the technological dark ages for the next generation as well.
Why do I have this urge to put a leech on the cable coming into my house to improve performance?
Option 3: Find a job in an area that has better Internet options and move there.
http://www.time4popcorn.eu/
None of the stupid irritating restrictions of the paid services.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You're buying something more along the lines of (tiny print) 10 kbps service burstable to (huge print) 10 Mbps.
ISP can just lower upstream to 1/10th what it is now, except toward "good" websites. It'll happen, just watch, this is America we're talking about.
So many Netflix customers watch via Roku / ATV / Chromecast / smart TV / Blu-Ray player... all devices with no local storage. Most of them barely have enough transient memory to handle buffering, and that's it. P2P generally requires you to have some storage space, where various uploads can be initiated as needed... it's even more necessary for streaming video P2P, which is time sensitive, as compared to raw file downloads. So I don't see how Netflix can really do anything more than offload a small fraction of their overall server traffic.
(runs)
Yet another answer for "Why is my hard drive going constantly?"
I'm just "this guy", you know?
I think this is more a bargaining tool to negotiating better rates at the toll booths. I'm not sure how practical this would be, but it does at least give them an option.
So what will Netflix do to protect it's customers that aid it in this peer-to-peer idea? And I mean protect them from lawsuits from the likes of RIAA, MPAA, or even the movie studios themselves? We have seen such lawsuits before, i.e. "The Hurt Locker" and more recently with "Dallas Buyers Club" (I think those titles are correct).
Does Netflix even have license to distribute this content via peer-to-peer? No license generally means lawsuit, potentially "open & shut" due to "breach of contract", or at least protracted public scrutiny.
What protects peer-to-peer participants from getting caught up in the "yes it's a form of broadcast / no it's not a form of broadcast" type of lawsuit that Aereo is currently facing in the US Supreme Court?
Then there are issues with geographical boundaries for content distribution that many licenses impose. Only recently Hulu started to block access via known VPN services under the premise that content from Hulu was being sent outside the US, and I believe it is due to Hulu not having license to send such traffic outside the US.
The legal ramifications of Netflix distribution via peer-to-peer are mind boggling...and potentially scary.
I sure don't want to end up in court trying to defend myself against a peer-to-peer sharing lawsuit.
Octoshape has the technology and has been doing p2p video transmission for the last 5-6 years. Specially good for hits, events and GoT premieres; since it takes the stress out of the source and keep traffic "inside" ISPs.
I have nothing to do with the company, but always wonder why didn't take the world by storm; maybe because thet were based in north europe.
cheers
That'd really piss off ISPs. Want to shakedown netflix for money to pay for priority lanes? Tada, now you've got huge downloads with accompanying uploads coming from distributed locations and using normal web ports. Talk about a nuclear option.
as mentioned on torrentfreak, some shops use bittorrent for updating servers, for example, twitter and facebook:
According to Tom Cook of Facebookâ(TM)s systems engineering group, the daily code updates for Facebook used to cause a lot of trouble until they discovered BitTorrent.
âoeBitTorrent is fantastic for this, itâ(TM)s really great,â Cook said. âoeItâ(TM)s âsuperduperâ(TM) fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns weâ(TM)ve had in the pastâ
source: http://torrentfreak.com/facebo... ....while they MAY be looking for p2p stuff for spreading video around... it is also possible job applicants would just be doing stuff behind the scenes, like theyve been doing elsewhere.
Chinese video streaming sites like ppstream have been doing this for years.
Sadly, their client is a little douchy and unless you're really careful installing, you'll end up running the p2p node
in the background whether you're watching or not.
In the end I had to strip all trace of it from my father-in-law's laptop. I couldn't read the (Chinese) EULA and config settings
and he didn't understand the technology. Every update of the app would reset the 'run-n-background' settings.
The service was pretty good though and I'd be happy to run a more trustworthy version.
Basically cable companies will put Netflix app on their own set top boxes and then subscribers who also subscribe to Netflix can start the app by going to channel #XXX.
So "just like a real cable channel" implies regular cable stations are just lousy apps that force you to watch one particular piece of content.
Fuck P2P, you still have a one to one load in the network. use multicast.