Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target?

snydeq writes "Responding to legal pressure over its throttling of P2P traffic and other dubious practices, Comcast says it will now punish the most abusive users rather than particular applications. Yet its pilot tests in Pennsylvania and Virgina, which would 'delay traffic for the heaviest users of Internet data without targeting specific software applications,' raise greater concerns over net neutrality, ones that belie a potential preemptive strike against the cable company's chief future competition: streaming video. 'Despite the industry's constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video,' writes Mehan Jayasuriya at Public Knowledge. 'Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they're effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it.'"

New business model

It seems that promising too much in order to hook new users and then hitting the heaviest users (instead of fulfilling the promise)is a very valid business strategy lately.

What about streaming for play content?

So if I sign up with MLB to watch games which are not in my local television area, should I expect to get throttled by my local cable company because for 3hrs a week, I use a lot of bandwidth. The other hours of the week, I'm doing email and IM.

Re:What about streaming for play content?

I'm in the UK. My ISP, BT (which I believe stands for Bastard Telcom), does in fact throttle my MLB.tv connection for afternoon games -- which are peak hours in the UK time zone 6pm to 10pm-ish. They are pretty much unwatchable. I can only watch games that start after 6pm Eastern -- midnight UK time -- without much interference.

We really need to fight ISPs a lot harder. They are killing progress. MLB.TV is a great idea. All sports should do the same, in fact the future of HBO or Showtime would be to use exactly the same business model. It would be popular, but it's impossible with the way ISP's behave right now.

Re: streaming for play content?DAMMIT! GET A DISH!

Alas I live in the deep woods, with a 35-year-old underground telecom wire. And can barely pull 35 Kbs if I'm lucky.

Then that's some good decades-old wiring. 50k is the best you can really get on dialup even in perfect conditions with pristine wiring, 33.6 without downstream tricks.

I do not understand these people who use THE INTERNET to download live action! It slows down even MY pathetic bandwidth! Fer goodness sakes guys, get a satellite dish. And if it's some illegal movie? Hell- go rent the damn video at your local store! It's faster. And cheaper. And - it's ILLEGAL? So go get an FTA sat receiver. They are easy enuf to find! You idiots are destroying the internet! I use the internet for internet-specific tasks (wotever that means; I'm still in WEB-1) A pox upon your movie torrents!

You're obviously trolling here, but it provides a good jumping off point for what I want to say, so I'll bite. First off, other people watching live streaming video online aren't likely to impact your connection. Satellite TV, Cable and over-the-air antenna don't carry every live video feed of interest to everyone, so that may be someone's only option to see a particular event live. Also, there are lots of legal services to get movies off the Internet--some dinky 2 bit operations you may have heard of called iTunes and Amazon.com. I can download a 2 hour standard def movie in about 20 minutes on my connection, which is on par with how long it would take to go to the rental store, minus the hassles and gasoline. And it's certainly not cheaper to rent.

Nobody's destroying the Internet--well, maybe the cable companies. You see, what's going to happen is we consumers might actually get what we've been asking for these past few decades--ala carte channels. Paying only for the channels and shows you actually want, and the cable company becomes a mere bandwidth provider akin to a utility. No more content, premium channels, pay per view, or any of that crap. You pay for the pipe to your house, and what you want to watch. Cable companies want to retain control and maintain their monopolies, so they'll fight this every step of the way. That's what the net neutrality fight is really all about. The cable companies don't want to relinquish control.

What do we pay for, then?

Isn't this taking away what people pay for? I know the main reason I got a faster internet connection was so I wouldn't have to wait for videos to buffer.

It's Not Anti-Competitive...

... it's pro-retarded.

"You can use your car for anything you want... as long as you don't use it to go to work, or drive long distances. That's rough on the engine."

Re:It's Not Anti-Competitive...

"You can use your car for anything you want... as long as you don't use it to go to work, or drive long distances. That's rough on the roads."

There, fixed it for ya.

Re:It's Not Anti-Competitive...

Also good. The metaphor still stands: The basic raison d'etre for a product or service can hardly be restrained in order to make it easier on said product or service that you're already paying for. If they get their way, high-speed internet will end up being like mass transit. AMERICAN mass transit.

Netflix Roku

I was just looking at the new Netflix Roku streaming service. To me this seems like a no brainer. $9/month for 1 DVD out at a time plus unlimited streaming movies and tv shows from there current selection. If Comcast was to start resetting connections while I was watching a movie that would really tick me off. Also don't providers realize that entertainment is moving more and more to the internet.

Re:Netflix Roku

They do, and they want to stop that. As long as people are forced to physically go to a store and buy some hard media, the copyright holders have us over a barrel and can do whatever they want. Sony's rootkit on it's music CDs, Starforce on a lot of games. Sooner or later, if laws and regulations force us to use hard media, those self-destructing DVDs will become the norm. Except, we'll be paying $20 each, instead of $5.

Re:Netflix Roku

Netflix not working for ya, huh? Oh, hey, good thing Comcast offers stutter-free On-Demand videos!

What's that? You didn't want to use Comcast's on-demand, because it's more expensive and has a crappy selection?

Huh. Too bad, I guess.

Welcome to the world of tomorrow.

I was wondering about this

I watch most of my news stories on the internet, primarily CNN. I have noticed in the past week that the videos seem to be stopping midstream when it never did that before. I glance over at my gkrellm network monitor and see zero data coming to my box. Then it will pick up again after a short pause. Something has changed, not sure if it is Comcast or the video feed itself.

Re:I was wondering about this

I'm noticing something similar with Youtube and such. It's downloading streaming video a hell of a lot slower, and I keep having to wait for another chunk to download.

Careful what you ask for...

Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they're effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network.

I'd be delighted to see streaming video killed.

We'd go back to "download the video to the client's hard drive, and play it back." Was that really such a bad thing?

Requiring a web-based client to stream content hosted on an external server, is, at the root of it, a form of DRM. When the server goes away (or deletes the link to it), the content becomes unplayable. This applies whether you're talking about YouTube's embedded flash player, or the hoops through which Windows users have to jump in order to save .wmv clips from TV news sites, etc.

And streaming is inefficient. You not only require a continuous throughput at a reasonably high bitrate, but after you've finished downloading your 20 megabytes of content for that 2-minute video clip, your client does you the favor of immediately deleting it. So the next time you want to watch the video, you get the joy of re-downloading it. WTF? In an age of $200 terabyte hard drives, that's ridiculous.

So bring on the death of streaming video, and let's get back to the good old days of File->SaveAs .mpg, .flv, .avi, .mp4, and a few minutes later, you can play the locally-stored content to your heart's content. Forever.

Like I said, cable companies... be careful what you ask for.

Re:Careful what you ask for...

Streaming video has its purposes. I know a site that recently switched to streaming after having the old download and watch method as you described. The reason? Bandwidth. Streaming for them uses LESS bandwidth because people were just downloading all their videos and leaving the site - never even watching them after they've been downloaded. The owners have to pay for that bandwidth even if it's going to waste.

You say that streaming is inefficient but that's not always true. I mean, if you're only going to watch something once you don't need the file again. And if you only want to watch a certain portion or decide you don't like the video halfway through then you've saved bandwidth.

Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target?

They want to control what we access, and when. The motive, of course, is money. But the collateral damage is our freedom.

All vs. Some

Non-discrimanatory traffic throttling and bandwidth caps are in my eyes, the only workable solution for a balance between net neutrality and 'ISP over-saturation'.

If my telco/cable offers a rate based on raw bandwidth even if it is tiered more expensively during peak times, it still means they have more respect from me than specificly targetting any given application / company. At least then I pay for my access to a given service is directly relational to the amount I pay for their service, instead of having a divisor calculated based on how much Google payola's to my ISP.

If I download 120GB and my cap is 100, I should get throttled/warnings/charged/dropped based on my ISP's policies. If I want >200GB cap, I can pay more, or look for a carrier that is more bandwidth compatable.

The most important factor in this whole thing is transparency. If my ISP wants to meter me at a given policy, the policy should be laid out 100% in my terms of service. If 'changes' that affect my experience on their network occur, it should be reported -proactively-. It doesn't mean that I can change their mind, but it does allow me to decide if I want to change providers before they break my internet.

Guilty.

MIT's Open Course-ware has videos (for some courses) of the entire semesters. I usually watch one or two per day, and they stream over an hour of .rm content each. So, I'm guessing that MIT is inherently evil for opening its fascinating courses for the public to view? Wait, MIT is trying to ruin the internet? OMG!! Not to mention, I routinely download Linux images for Open Suse, Fedora, and Ubuntu for 3 different architechtures AND keep them up to date with patches. That's about 25+ GB (big B) of data/month in free software and video alone. Damn, this free stuff is undermining the entire ISP's monopoly and forcing them to expand their networks... and charge me more money/month. Guess there really is no such think as a free lunch. Can I get some sort of open source ISP please?

Fundamental Flaw with Cable

This is just the fundamental flaw with cable that has been waiting to expose itself since day 1:

Cable uses a shared local loop, and they advertise it as unlimited, and they advertise it as having 5 megabits. That math does not work. It is a lie. It is false advertising. They've only been getting away with it because most customers don't use what they've been sold.

Except that is changing. Video is exposing the lies of cable, and they're proposed solution is screwing the customer. Since they've been getting away with it for so long, they believe they are entitled to continue lying and to screw their customers to protect their lies. This is false advertising that has not been painful enough to result in a lawsuit. Now it is going to get there real fast unless they do something. So they are trying to convince the world that the customers are at fault. That is another lie. Don't buy it.

Stop lying about the product. False advertising is the problem here. People expect their cable to support 5 megabits unlimited because that's what they were sold. Degrading the service to those who consume what they were sold isn't just ethically reprehensible, it is (or at least should be) illegal.

There is no question of whether protocol throttling or customer throttling is the solution to the problem. There is no problem with the product. The problem is the false advertising.

Tell me...

How does one abuse an "unlimited" internet plan?

Look at the words

"[..]the most abusive users [...]"

since when is USING a flat rate abuse? Goddammit, sell your bandwidth as "10GB per month" and shut up.

Conflict of Interest

This is problematic because the largest US ISPs are also big media companies.

Ideally, an ISP would be like a utility company. Pay a metered rate and the ISP moves data in the quickest and most efficient way possible. The ISP shouldn't care if broadband connections are used for streaming TV shows and movies. But many ISPs do care because they own TV networks and movie studios which are threatened by streaming media.

Look at Time Warner's plan to charge customers $1/GB if they exceed the monthly limit of 40 GB. Would you be surprised if Time Warner opens its own online store to sell movies and TV shows, one where downloads aren't counted against the monthly bandwidth limit? You think Apple or Netflix would appreciate that? And given the pitiful state of broadband competitiveness in the US, many consumers would be stuck with Time Warner...that or dial-up.

Just some of the many dangers of media consolidation.

Based on my personal experience, possibly

It seems like YouTube is getting throttled a lot lately. To be fair though, I haven't checked for the deadly RST packet. Shouldn't be too hard. I just need to set Wireshark to filter everything but RST packets. Of course, that won't really let me know that it was Comcast that sent it. I'd say that a RST followed by the next packet in the expected sequence would be a giveaway, since the TCB at YouTube's server wouldn't send the next packet in sequence if it had sent the RST. Of course, if what Comcast is using to do this is stateful and smart, it'll block that next packet too. So. There is no way to tell, barring YouTube actually logging instances of having sent the RST itself, and letting us access that log. Feel free to point out any flaws in this analysis. I just typed it out in 5 minutes.

The bottom line though, is that YouTube is choppy lately.

It'd be nice if Adobe fixed flash so that it would double the buffering time whenever it got stuck. In other words, if it waits 5 seconds to buffer and then gets stuck again, it should wait 10 seconds the next time before trying to resume the stream. If it gets stuck again, it should wait 20 seconds. And so on, until, if necessary, it buffers the entire vid before playing.

Of course Adobe is not the underlying problem; but they could be more robust given the current environment.

Re:Nonsensical reasoning

If I had a choice in high speed internet companies, then they could throttle all they wanted. The problem is that I don't, Cox is the only game in town. They don't have any competition in the internet department, so by your reasoning they should be able to kill any service they don't like? That's murder, not competition, and it's not good for anyone involved except for a few executives who won't have to deal with the fallout of their monopoly being broken up by force.

Re: Nonsensical ranting

As everyone knows, taking actions to further your own prospects at the expense of others, i.e. competing, is anti-competitive. Only Special Olympics-style "competition" is allowed in our infantilized society.

:sigh:
To regurgitate, again: it's anticompetitive. because they use a monopoly in one market (internet access), which might be state-funded no less, to help their position in a different market, specifically streaming video.
This hampers competition in the streaming video market by making it impossible for online video sites to compete on equal footing.
People need to remember that the free market exists for a purpose - to allow the best product to win. These kinds of tactics completely destroy that mechanism.