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)
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
2. Save lots of money for bandwidth from the content providers to them
3. Profit
No need for a ???
I would pay for such a service stateside. (Score:2)
Streaming multicast video from local networks? It'd be like having my own satellite feed. CNN Pipeline and other current video-on-demand stuff is a weak attempt; unambitious and ultimately flawed in execution.
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
Obviously this won't work for streaming, but a similar method could be employed.. in particular, it could start multicasting a movie every 5 minutes, so that you'll never be more than 5 minutes away from the start of a movie, and ser
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2, Informative)
1) Multicast for "Regularly scheduled programming"
2) P2P for day after and future VOD distribution.
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
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 ins
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
So why can't they do it with Multicast?
As for figuring out how many people are watching, another reply has it right: we don't know now, so worst case scenario, what changes there?
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
I know! Imagine if television signals were broadcast over the air, to cathode ray tube based devices with little to no digital components at all, and no way for viewing data to be sent back to the broadcaster?
Oh wait, that's the way it's worked for over 50 years. And there's a multibillion dollar ratings collection company
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
"If Nielsen TV Ratings has contacted you, we hope you will participate"
If that's not voluntary, I don't know what is...
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
the tv companies have no ide how many people are watching them, they believe the poll results that are given to them by poll companies that are in close connection with them and therefor not objective
Its artifically high, the hardware cost is low (Score:2)
$0000000000000's worth so the station will have a hard time recovering the cost.
Hardware wise its peanuts. Hell, its probably cheaper to pay $10m to make a sat and launch a sat from russia for $20m, than
pay the local govt $80m for a damn licence. And go broadcast from space geo.
Imagine if the govt suddenly made a 'website licence' and charged people $1000/yr. Or a streaming media licence for
$10/gig/year or some
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
Max
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
iTunes is not wildly profitable because the Record Companies said "give us X% or we won't give you access to our catalogues"
Apple got their foot in the door and is laughing all the way to the bank. They could lose money on iTunes and still be laughing, all because the iPod is making a killing.
Now, Apple has enough muscle to tell the **AA to go pound s [wordorigins.org]
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
Cheers.
Re:Change the paradigm (Score:2)
And hackers want to be counted. Honestly, they'd try harder, because we watch stuff like Firefly that we love and want to do well, but doesn't pull in numbers. So I'd be worried about the opposite effect: People downloading 2-3 times in order to boost a show's numbers.
Hot Tub Etiquette (Score:2)
p2p Broadcasting a single feed is like having everyone shift over one seat.
you get to sit next to the jet the same amount time. But you may not get to sit there when you choose.
BT and Hollywood (Score:2)
Re:BT and Hollywood (Score:2)
Re:BT and Hollywood (Score:2)
Check out the contents of the average torrent site. Now you tell me: Is the vast majority of the content independently produced movies and music, or is it bootleg copies of the latest in-theater releases and pop tunes?
People complain that Hollywood and the music industry make junk that's not worth watching or listening to, but apparently it's worth the time to find, download, watch and listen to... od
What happened to all the... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What happened to the MBONE? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What happened to the MBONE? (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason is the complexity involved in deployment (multiple protocols, MBGP, MSDP, etc.) and that you have the 'third-party problem'. Basically both transmitters and receivers have to rely on a third-party for a redezvous-point.
Scalable Internet wide multicast deployment *might* happen with IPv6 because some of the issues have been solved (using, for example, embedable rendevous points - negating the need the 3rd parties). However if you look at how IS
Re:What happened to the MBONE? (Score:2)
At least that's what I've heard and it makes sense. Maybe the market pressures that cause power companies to give you rebates on EnergyStar gear could come into play.
Or maybe a media enterprise will gobble up a tier one provider and make it happen to make multicast TV happen for their customers.
Multicast works....it's political (Score:4, Informative)
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]
Re:Multicast works....it's political (Score:2)
That's not true. Having multicast turned on to support OSPF is not the same thing as multicast routing, which is what's necessary to support multicast feeds.
The major problem with deploying multicast Internet-wide is management and security. ISPs would have to accept multicast routing information from their neighbors and trust they know what they're doing,
Re:Multicast works....it's political (Score:2)
Re:What happened ... (Score:2)
The same that happened with IPv6 ? Technology is right here but currently almost nobody cares to use it...
Re:What happened ... (Score:2)
Or maybe media companies just don't want a working online model instead of overloaded Akamai servers?
Figures (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming Akamai has only 10,000 servers, that's 15 streams per server. C'mon now, we're not that stupid.
Akamai embellishment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Akamai embellishment (Score:2)
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.
Re:Figures (Score:2)
Maybe they're just short on bandwidth? 150,000 HDTV video streams is a hell of a lot of bits per second. Actually, it's 1/3rd of a terrabyte/sec, or so.
I'm willing to bet that akamai's more focused on sending large numbers of people 10k files periodically, than sending 18 mb/s video streams.
what idiot would stream mpeg2? (Score:2)
Re:what idiot would stream mpeg2? (Score:2)
yeah, but that's not the subject here (Score:2)
right, lets not look at the future (Score:2)
That's not fair (Score:2)
NASA sure showed them though.
Re:right, lets not look at the future (Score:2)
>>"Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams"
[notice the word "can't", indicative of the PRESENT FUCKING TENSE.]
>Assuming Akamai has only 10,000 servers, that's 15 streams per server. C'mon now, we're not that stupid.
eipgam challenged his challenge of that statement, by saying 'servers will have a hard time serving 15 of the future's dynamically generate
I am (Score:2)
Off I go.
The future is peer. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The future is peer. (Score:2)
Re:The future is peer. (Score:2)
Re:The future is peer. (Score:2)
CoDiO P2P Streaming (Score:2)
Re:CoDiO P2P Streaming (Score:2)
> with copy protection as far as I know...
HDTV will be.
Home grown HDTV? (Score:2)
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.
Someone clearly didn't get the idea of P2P (Score:2)
No way. I'm gald to support the legal P2P community; I frequently leave Knoppix or other Linux distros running for weeks on end on a spare system here and make available my modest upstream bandwidth. And I can understand that some may want to use their bandwidth to share material that might anger the MPAA or RIAA (and particularly in the case of the RIAA I don't have very negative feelings about that). But that's a far cry from ever t
No free lunch (Score:2)
Re:No free lunch (Score:2)
Re:No free lunch (Score:2)
Re:No free lunch (Score:2)
Because it might, for example, just make true video-on-demand, any movie or TV show anytime you want it feasible? Because people might want such a service? Because otherwise it might be too damned expensive to be economically viable? Because that bandwidth for which you're already paying a fixed monthly fee is probably sitting there unused 99% of the time anyway?
Accelerating Returns (Score:2)
The computer and computing industry isn't standing still. Processor and signal transmission speeds increase exponentially. There will be quite enough bandwidth and processing power for everybody.
Who are Grid Networks? (Score:2)
Does anybody have any info on Grid Networks, or are they vaporware?
P2P is not "under control" (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course we would not get a say what we distribute. But that's not the point. You cannot rely on a P2P Server to provide real time content. Suddenly it's gone, because I switch the box off. Even if you have a few fallback "servers" on the list it's nothing you can build a reliable service on. And people do get angry if their favorite soap suddenly skips right after the words "I kept silent 'til now, but now I have to say it. I am..."
Not to mention the danger of tampering with the content. Yes, they will encrypt it, yes, they will make it near impossible to inject anything, but there is still the danger that in the middle of a Disney Movie you suddenly get to see
Re:P2P is not "under control" (Score:2)
"Fuck Mickey Mouse! Fuck him in the ass with a big rubber dick! And then break it off and beat him with it!"
Re:P2P is not "under control" (Score:2)
Yes? Yes? You are what? What are you? The suspense is killing me!!
Trillian
Re:P2P is not "under control" (Score:2)
You're not kidding. Years ago I went searching for Finding Nemo on Kazaa (yes, it's a quaint story ;-), and found 7 other movies, one of which was a neat Swedish porn.
Now, if my kids had found that while innocently looking for Finding Nemo, I'd
Re:P2P is not "under control" (Score:2)
The servers would never go down, I imagine they'll run the "tracker" function centrally. The question is rather if you can get enough peers to upload, and why? P2P is quite reliable enough for soft real-time (buffered)
Re:P2P is not "under control" (Score:2)
Not that it would be too bad for some shows. Considering the quality of some TV shows anything injected would certainly provide a lot more entertainment.
P2P sounds great but (Score:2)
Also, shouldn't they be paying ME to use MY bandwidth?
P2P TV and Movies should be FREE... (Score:2)
If you want me to watch your television, your commericials, while you profit in the millions of dollars AND use my bandwidth?!.... You're giving it to me free!
Game on, you DRM motherfuckers
Hollywood-run p2p? Unlikely (Score:2)
That seems unlikely to me... people would have to be willing to trade away their spare bandwidth for... what, exactly? Being able to watch movies/TV on their computer? They can do that now if they want, without having to run any "industry-approved" p2p clients (and all that that implies).
Plenty of P2P CDN's (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Congress should pass a multicast law (Score:2)
You want to see cable and DSL operators go nutz with foaming mouths, get your congressman to introduce a bill requiring multicast to be enabled on all routers and switches, and add a provision punishing ISP's who knowingly degrate UDP.
Many people think that multicast is a failure and does not work, fact of the matter is, it's deployed WORLD WIDE on the backbones of both Internet and Inte
Hey Cringley. You missed one method. (Score:2)
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/72293 [dslreports.com]
Revenue Streams (Score:5, Informative)
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.
110MB/sec from hard drives / WAY under on Cost $$$ (Score:2)
Re:110MB/sec from hard drives / WAY under on Cost (Score:2)
Re:Revenue Streams (Score:2)
Re:Revenue Streams (Score:2)
Re:Revenue Streams (Score:2)
But most of the existing fiber is dark. There's at least 10x as much unlit, so that 10x price decrease is inev
Protocol choice for massive video streaming (Score:2)
Fine... Lets do it their way (Score:2)
I'll be happy to join their "P2P" network, buy the content for a reasponable price, and share pieces of files I download to other users that want the same thing. However, their litigious and moneygrubbing attitude makes me NOT want to share any of my bandwidth with them for free. They would have to offer me a monetary incentive to consider using my bandwidth to
Riight... (Score:2)
That's assuming that Hollywood hasn't worn out its welcome with users, which it has in spades. I think the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by users, who will watch content owned and created by users, and BitTorrent is a great distribution method for it.
wow, Cringley discovers the head-end problem... (Score:2)
and everyone forgets about (Score:2)
oh killler mbone apps where art though
I don't get it (Score:2)
Point 2: BitTorrent allows you to add seeds to the torrent as you feel like. When I read "data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data." I ask the simple question: Really
What about... (Score:2)
Cringely changes his column name.. (Score:2)
Cringely States The Obvious.
The industry has been bleating about P2P for on-demand for years. It's the perfect solution for cable operators who have networks designed around INTERNAL traffic and pushing data around to subscribers. If the subscribers share the networking and you can have a city block feeding itself..
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 unders
Re:The problem already has a solution (Score:2)
It's more than multicasting (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Simple solution to this problem (Score:2)
Re:Simple solution to this problem (Score:2)
Re:Simple solution to this problem (Score:2)
The problem is that the Internet is one-way these days. Most home users (i.e. the consumers of this content) don't have a real IP address, so this won't work.
What we need is multicast and IPv6.
Re:Simple solution to this problem (Score:2)
oh, wait.
anyway, there are these neat things called 'forward error correction' and 'fountain codes'; where you add parity to the data as you send it out, so that if a few bits are missing, the loss can be dectected, and if small enough, corrected. Like RAID, but for data streams instead of storage. A digital signal receiver could
Re:the changing nature of content (EXAMPLE) (Score:2)
Here is an example of the correctness of your point.
You can invest 30 minutes of your time watching yet another forumlaic sitcom on cable or the web, with perhaps a 10% chance-per-minute of having a really good laugh; or you can spend the same time clicking around YouTube.
If only 25% of the amateur comedy on that site, and others like it, make you laugh heartily ... you'll end up with up to 7.5 times as many laughs!
(Thoughly bogus mathematics provided for illustrative purposes only!)
My experience: Upstream is critical (Score:2)
The client looked a little sketchy at first, so I have been running it in a VMWare client. But that was me being rather paranoid.
Streams take a
Re:Sell the keys... (Score:2)
If somebody
Re:Sell the keys... (Score:2)
Re:Cable Modems perfect for broadcasting? (Score:2)
And they've switched to randomly assigning DHCP addresses with non-overlapping subnets (very frustrating for i