Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target? 190
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Old business model (Score:2)
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What about streaming for play content? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about streaming for play content? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:What about streaming for play content? (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole throttling issue tends to point to insufficient network resources. Perhaps also the network routers are not up to the task. It will break peoples visions of on demand TV, as well as other services! High definition video seems to be totally out of the question on most of todays networks. (Most, but not all
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We really need a new ISP. The current ones are creating a market for inexpensive, unthrottled domestic connections.
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Agree. But meteors also have negative consequences at the tier-1 level.
No reason why you can't build a backbone to someone who will peer - it'll happen when there's money in it. And that will happen when enough people get annoyed.
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And as long as were on the topic, F*** Cingular Wireless. Not trolling, just my short version of
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The short answer is yes.
You won't be the only one maxing out their link when the Yankees play at home.
MLB.TV [mlb.com] video is $60-$90 a year.
The premium level service includes standard-def video, Player Tracker Live-At-Bat and up to six live game feeds. To me this screams "hard-core fan who will be sucking up all the bandwidth
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3MBps
2MBps
1.5MBps
1.2MBps
at each transition, a very clear increase in the number of duplicate TCP ACKs appeared. When the transmission started, there were zero duplicate ACKs for 75 seconds. Then about half of the returning packets became duplicates. On and on....
This is absolutely Comcast injecting these and i
Re: streaming for play content?DAMMIT! GET A DISH! (Score:2, Funny)
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.
If I need an SPx upgrade or whatever, I go to a friend's in the town nearby and DL it onto my thumb-drive.
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.
Re: streaming for play content?DAMMIT! GET A DISH! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What do we pay for, then? (Score:4, Insightful)
However within the last year or so, the average joe can now use internet video as a replacement for cable television. As a result bandwidth demands have gone up and television revenues have gone down.
Its really a dinosaur business model, as long as you're getting Internet from someone in the TV business, you're going to be a second-class customer.
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People are paying for broadband to the home at a mass market price.
The question is whether everyone who wants standard and HD video streams at 9 PM Eastern Time can get them without being bumped up to a higher tier of service.
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Comcast are what you could call a fraud.
It goes like this
You pay for bandwidth
Comcast takes your money and doesn't deliver the bandwidth you paid for by means of throttling.
It's Not Anti-Competitive... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's Not Anti-Competitive... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pack in the users and enjoy the revenue stream until you can get pay per play vids locked down on your terms
If you like a "car" metaphor lets try:
This is not your parents "Trans-Am" generation.
Welcome to the toll roads and internal DHS checkpoints.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKDdH8xtpN4 [youtube.com]
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It is retarded, or rather retarding, as in America is falling behind in technological infrastructure. 60% of Hong Kong is using IPTV, and here in this former super power, we have ISP throttling connections because of YouTube. Maybe if we weren't spending all of our money rebuilding/destroying/rebuilding the infrastructure on the other side of the globe.....
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Re:It's Not Anti-Competitive... (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is why the analogy is deeply flawed. Owning a car is not like hiring an ISP. You pay the ISP some money and they have to cover all the costs. The contract is short term. Any equipment is often consumable. It is not like owning a car, where you buy the car and can do anything you want with it because you own it. It is yours, you are keeping it, and the dealer could care less.
A more reasonable analogy is leasing a car. In this case you are paying for the use of the car for a specified time period, just like most ISP contracts, and, just like a lease, the ISPs are being forced to impose limits on the heavy users to be fair for everyone. Most lease agreements limit your use to 15000 miles. You can buy more up front, or pay for overages at the end. There are often other restrictions, But again, you are responsible for the car, so even this is not a good comparison.
Likely the best comparison is renting a car. The agency covers all maintenance, you just pay for the gas. In this cae, the agency is very interested in what you do with car, even putting tracking devices that record speed, distance, and location. It seems to me that, due to the fact that there is little physical product involve. the most reasonable case is somewhere between a lease and rental. But the idea is this, as people begin to use bandwidth, either all of us will pay equally to cover the high end users, much like what happens now with the subsidies of big cars, or those that want more will pay for it themselves.
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Another reason to use FiOS... (Score:2, Interesting)
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DSL was not throttled for early subscribers, it has now reached the point where it is cheap and the infrastructure behind it is getting too expensive to run if everyone uses it heavily.
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Netflix Roku (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Netflix Roku (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Netflix Roku (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I try NBC.com video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds.
I try Hulu video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds.
I try Netflix and video stutters and gives me "3 hours" to ensure smooth playback.
I give up and bittorrent it.
2 days later "We've registered a copyright violation on your connection and will be disconnecting you. You get three free reconnects after which it'll cost $30."
My bandwidth is fine--over an average of 30 seconds. Within 10 sec
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I was wondering about this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I was wondering about this (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that I'm saying they're angels... (Score:2)
Careful what you ask for... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
I pull streamed videos I will want to watch again out of the /tmp/ folder.
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Re:Careful what you ask for... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
It doesn't have to be that way. In Windows Media, for example, we have the Fast Cache option, which allows the client to buffer the streamed assets so that you can watch the same part of the stream again without having to resend.
Now, in the big picture, the usage models between progressive download over http and streaming over UDP are going away pretty quickly. With byterange seek, you can do random access in progressive download now, and with server-side bitrate throttling you can avoid the problem of a u
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There's also an extension called UnPlug, and about half a dozen others that do the same thing. Test 'em all and use what works for you - UnPlug works the best for me it seems.
Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple solution (Score:2, Interesting)
If the video is ad-supported, the price goes down.
If it's a blockbuster video, the price goes up.
Either way, the cable company gets the same $carraige_fee for every 1-hour video, whether it's from the end user or a sponsor. If the cable company has to pay a studio something, then that cost is passed on to end users.
So, instead of videos being "free" because the cable co. doesn't have to pay a vendor, they'll be $1 or somethin
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All vs. Some (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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wasn't this always obvious? (Score:3, Insightful)
the phone companies got hit by VOIP. and now the cablecos and the telcos are worried that some "video vonage" will come in and offer video at a lower rate over their own data lines.
this has been the game all along. come on in, take a seat.
Monopoly Money (Score:2)
A horde of independent YouTubers, whether at some new Google operation like YouTube or millions of independent video websites or P2P sessions, is a nightmare for them. Because they all want a free ride on the net
The opposite just happened to me (Score:2, Informative)
No shit though, tha
Guilty. (Score:4, Insightful)
Fundamental Flaw with Cable (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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The real problem is that some users now can make use of 10+ megabit transfer rates continuously for long periods of time. The only connection that can do that is a dedicated fiber that extends from the head end to the home. And then the OC3 headend is vastly overcommitted as well. No, that isn't going to happen in the US anytime
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The problem is the cost of bandwidth in general. Do you know how much the bandwidth your ISP resells to you costs THEM? It's a hell of a lot more than $40-$60 for 6 megabits. More like $100/megabit. More than that if your ISP is in a rural area.
Cable ISPs aren't trying to be dicks. They're trying to keep the cost of the service down. To actually provide 6/8/10 megabits to EVERY user would mean that, guess what, you'
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The problem is the cost of bandwidth in general. Do you know how much the bandwidth your ISP resells to you costs THEM? It's a hell of a lot more than $40-$60 for 6 megabits. More like $100/megabit. More than that if your ISP is in a rural are
Bulk bandwidth price at a good location and in big enough amounts is no more than $10/mbit.
Of course, ISPs aren't optimally located (especially rural ones) and they also have to maintain the last mile network. But don't go spewing crap like the general bandwidth prices being too high.
Also, the bulk of the cost from having to dig the lines in the first place. Upgrading capacity should be far from a linear increase in bandwidth costs, especially in rural locations, where the base cost is larger so the capaci
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Tell me... (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the words (Score:5, Insightful)
since when is USING a flat rate abuse? Goddammit, sell your bandwidth as "10GB per month" and shut up.
Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Not streaming video specifically (Score:2)
(This is ALL supposition.)
It isn't video specifially so much as any service that proves that "unlimited" internet service doesn't mean what they've been insinuating it means for years.
Look at it like this: When the cable companies sell their service to the public, the only thing they can say that users can latch into is that it's Faster Than X, where X is a transfer speed offered by a competitor or, in areas where there isn't much competition, X is a perception of slowness in general. That, or reliab
Maybe some enterprising /.ers could. . . (Score:2)
Based on my personal experience, possibly (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I do this with some of the other video sites too. Pause it, let it buffer enough to not worry about the stuttering.
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Ah, 300 Kbps H.263 + mono 22 KHz MP3. Just like web video I was making a decade ago
They gotta answer this question first : (Score:2)
You cant deliver the pipe? Guess what! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you cant deliver the pipe... get out of the broadband industry because the demand for bandwidth is ONLY going to increase. It will NEVER decrease. We are a technological society, with more and more people using the internet everyday. The applications on the net are only going to increase the demand for bandwidth and speed.
Comcast, if you think you're having bandwith problems now... wait until 2011. Get off your ass and build for it, today. Stop punishing your customers, you have plenty of money as a business to provide the services that are demanded by your customers. AND YES... they are obviously demanded by your customers because the demand is too much for your network.
FIX IT.
How can a broadband provider see an increase in demand for bandwidth, and simply say... we're not going to increase our capacity? The demand is there because it is what is required by todays users.
You're not a broadband provider if you can not provide broadband. Comcast, you're a failure.
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Comcast is awful (Score:2, Insightful)
What a bunch of fucking assholes. (Score:2)
Um, you think? (Score:2)
It's the exact same thing here: You can get about half of wh
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Then you could have all the shows, games, music, and books that you want, for free
You could have all the old shows, games, music and books you wanted. The supply of new ones would be somewhat limited unless you came up with a new system of patronage to get them produced.
"What's that, one geek will buy the box set and torrent it to everyone else?"
"Yup, that's right."
"I guess the production budget is $20 then... we'll have to pass on Tricia Helfer and just Handicam your mom in a pair of spandex shorts"
"Naah, my mom eats more than $10 worth of Doritos a day"
"Shoot, just cut the costume budget and shoot her naked then."
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So, though I outlined one possible solution, I also feel that losing crap like Spiderman 3 with it's budget of 9 tri
Well Duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nonsensical reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well I guess I deserve that response for feeding a troll, but when you grow up maybe you'll see the real problem here : that the big telecoms are holding back our nation's technological progress just to satisfy the greed of thier shareholders.
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P.S. You may have the last word now, obviously that is what matters to you.
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If you want to use rhetoric rather than reason, how would you suggest we communicate? Because I certainly didn't say anything remotely like "I want companies to do things that run counter to the satisfaction of their shareholders".
*sigh*
Well, perhaps you are one of those extremist capitalist types who believes we should unbalance our economy by removing all economic controls
Re:Nonsensical reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
The worse part is the multi-billion dollar corporations have been paid billions by the government to roll out universal broadband to everyone and have never delivered. That's worth whining about.
So the major telcos were given over 200 billion [pbs.org] to give broadband to the nation and not delivering, in exchange for special FCC privileges to deny competition from really getting a foothold. There's been numerous articles about the money spent for services never delivered, that was just the first to show up in google.
The '96 telco act was passed to help get competition. CLECs were able to be formed, basically a second fiddle telco setup. Then Bush selected Powel's kid as chairman of the FCC and they went - not surprisingly - for big business monopolistic decisions. They dropped the telco act, they allowed companies to be pure monopolies once again. In fact Ameritech/SBC was petitioning that they wouldn't roll out any more broadband until the act was rolled back as they didn't want competition. They promised that if it was rolled back they'd get everyone on the latest broadband. And the suckers in Washington believed it!
If our telco companies existed in a free market, I'd be perfectly fine with having to move to get real service. Being in federally and state mandated monopolies is just a pain in the ass for innovation and should be complained about often.
Re: Nonsensical ranting (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Nonsensical reasoning (Score:4, Funny)
Whatever happened to "build a better mousetrap"? It's thinking like yours that has ruined American business.
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I can attest to the fact YouTube has not been so snappy lately. First, I noticed that embedded videos(ie watching a YT video on some other website) is ultra-slow, going to 19990-era speeds(ie no realtime streaming). Then I go to the youtube page, and it's not that much better.
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I feel sorry for people stuck with Virgin broadband.... NTL/Telewest were bought out, and it was obvious that when they were bought out the buyers were in it purely to profit heavily from the cable monopoly that NTL/Telewest had.
Not much later, Virgin brought in dynamic throttling of download speed at peak times. Then they were found to be installing spyware on their network (Phorm), then they added more throttling during the day.... and The Register is running a story about how VM are getting into bed wi