Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers 179
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?"
Change the paradigm (Score:3, Interesting)
Predictions (Score:2, Interesting)
Great. Another prediction on what technology will or will not be able to do in the near future.
We all know how accurate these are.
Also: There is a difference between serving the exact same fucking content, at the same time to 1 million people and generating custom pages on-demand for 1 million people.
Re:The problem already has a solution (Score:2, Interesting)
The difference between UDP and other protocols is that UDP does not ensure that packets are not lost. This works well for audio and video because if you miss a frame or two, you probably won't notice too much. This is the equivalent of broadcasting a signal over the air waves. Sometimes it'll be a little fuzzy, but you can still understand what's being sent.
But like I mentioned before, UDP streaming broadcasts will not give you a high quality, 100% accurate and on demand data stream. That's why we're focussing on P2P instead.
I think the worries over the datacenters is a bit unfounded at the moment. 10 years ago, using 1GB of harddrive space and ever needing more than a 14.4kbps modem seemed insane. But now things are different. And the cable tv to internet swtich won't happen overnight. I think our technology will catch up by the time it catches on.
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:3, Interesting)
But when you put it online (multicasting, Bittorrent, whatever) how do you tell whats your audience? You can't track them, hackers would go insane and tear the tracking code out. Centralizing is too cumbersome (bandwidth costs would skyrocket) and de-centralization (Napster) only works if people 'opt-in' to whatever crazy system the company picks. The iTunes store does fairly well as a centralized system, but even Apple has admitted this, their profits are virtually a joke in terms of actual cash amount.
Re:Akamai embellishment (Score:2, Interesting)
In some datacenters Akamai has only a few servers, so the logic of picking the closest server to meet the listner can backfire if that datacenter has limited capacity.