Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers

Anonymous Coward writes "Robert X Cringely is postulating today that as bandwidth applications grow, the data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data. Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams, which is never going to impress the TV network exec used to audiences in the millions. Cringely choruses that secure P2P is the solution to delivering not only high quality video but also to audiences that scale in the millions. BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently, so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?"

The problem already has a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called multicasting. If anyone actually supported it, life would be great. We use it internally for live video and it's great.

The future is peer.

[soupdevil]

Content creators and content consumers are becoming one and the same. You can see this every day on sites like Jamendo [jamendo.com] and Flickr [flickr.com].

Re:Change the paradigm

[im_thatoneguy]

Multicasting will deal with the challenge faced with distributing a single live event. However, TV networks are moving into Video On Demand as quickly as they can. They will have to probably invest in two distribution bases.

1) Multicast for "Regularly scheduled programming"
2) P2P for day after and future VOD distribution.

Either that or be a public service provider?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/ [bbc.co.uk]

Just one reason why the BBC is better that any media companies in the US (imo).

From what I've seen of US tv, if I lived there I wouldn't bother with a TV, and if you think I'm being anti-US, I also have to say that watching German, French, Swiss and Italian TV whilst on holiday in Europe convinced me I wouldn't bother with a tv if I lived their either.

That's not to say the BBC is the only good quality tv provider in the UK, we also have providers such as Channel 4, but then again, they are also part publicly funded...

P.S. I'm not sure if by network providers you meant the ISPs, but if that is the case then I ought to point out that the BBC is peering directly with other ISPs at LINX in London and this should benefit both sides as the bandwidth required for multicasing should be greatly reduced.

Re:What happened to the MBONE?

[Russ Nelson]

Whatever happened to the MBONE? I see that a book on the subject is now posted to the web and freely copyable because it's gone out of print. The MBONE FAQ dates from 1993. That's like (/me whips out his HP-41C calculator) 13 years old. Apparently the IETF has a group for MBONE Deployment, but it hasn't been updated since last September, and even then it was a year late for its final milestone.

Plenty of P2P CDN's

[ozzee]

Chaincast
NetCableTV
Red Swoosh
Kontiki

Just to name a few.

Some of these have been in production for many years. Chaincast is/was the leader in radio streaming (at one time).

There are more advantages with P2P streaming/downloads than meet the eye. You also get better sharing of data in the local network. i.e. you're at Starbucks, you see someone watching somthing you want too - start the download an you get it at full speed from one laptop directly to the next. Also, from an infrastructure pespective, it's automatically fault tolerant.

It's big.

Multicast works....it's political

[Danathar]

Multicast has been deployed on Internet2 for some time now. I've watched 720p streams multicasted from Europe with no problem.

The problem with deploying it on the commercial Internet is political. Backbone commercial Internet providers have had multicast on for a LONG time. ISP's that give you your home broadband connection which are mostly cable TV operators and companies like verizon don't want to provide a cost effective way for content providers on the net to deliver video. They would rather charge you for their "middleman" service. It's not like they don't know how to enable it, all they need to do is enable it on their switches and routers.

Most cable operators use multicast already to stream the channels through their set top boxes.

In Britain The BBC is working with ISP's to multicast to broadband connections. That would REALLY be nice if something similar happened here (In the U.S.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/ [bbc.co.uk]

Revenue Streams

[Doc Ruby]

Cringeley doesn't mention Akamai. Where does this 150K max users figure come from? If "tens of thousands" of servers is only 10K servers, then 150K streams is only 15 streams:server.

But even a $2K P4/4.3GHz can serve over 1750 simultaneous 500Kbps video streams (from my own benchmarks), for 875Mbps. Since Gbps fiberoptics cost <$5000:mo, or under $3:stream:mo, 10K servers should serve at least 17 million simultaneous users; 58K servers serve over 100 million simultaneous streams.

Use more efficient servers, like SANs coupled more directly to routers, and you're talking about <$3:stream:mo for maybe 100K servers serving over 1 billion people, for a $100M investment that can be amortized over a few years. Years which can bring maybe $1-100:mo profit on 1-10 billion consumers, or 10-10,000x ROI.

Such a network is much more efficient and economical as P2P, or multicast. But even the raw numbers sound very profitable. That's why Akamai is making so much money, even though their market is still so small.