Comments on: ISPs prepare for video revolution

Peer-to-peer could be your service providers' best friend as it tries to handle the rising tide of video on the Net.

[McPlot]

Now, if you take all the people using P2P for illeagle reasons and arrest them. The people using P2P for legal use, would not even be noticed.

Cry all you want, but you know that 95% of P2P users are using it to steal copy righted material. Until that changes, I do not feel bad for P2P users not getting a good connection.

[Lerianis]

Yeah, keep on spouting that lie, McPlot (i.e. Recording and Movie company shill). The fact is that most people using Bittorrent are using it to download legal or 'grey area' material (foreign shows like One Piece and Naruto: Shippuuden).
You need to stop trying to parrot the Recording and Movie company line that 'most people using p2p are using it to get illegal material'. I am sorry, but that is not true, and furthermore, has been PROVEN to not be true.

Even if it was true, if a lot of people are trading things 'illegally'...... guess what? Our Founding Fathers put it into the laws that if a majority of the people or significant minority of the people ignore a law, that law is NULL AND VOID.

That would mean that since 99% of the people ignore the DMCA...... it's null and void. Since 80% or more of people say that copyright law is too strict in this country..... that law is null and void. Etc. Etc. Etc.

[McPlot]

ha! You ADMIT to stealing copyrighted programs, and you don't even know you are stealing them, LOL.

[sanenazok]

Oh come on- just because someone disagrees with you suddenly they're a shill and for the worst companies ever, too. Well, in that case you're a shill for Opec, the tobacco industry, or whatever. Sure I don't know anything about you, but since I disagree with you I must attack you personally.

[i_am_still_wade]

As good as an idea as this is, it will be a long time before it goes anywhere. First, the big ISP's are trying to figure out a way to raise rates while technically not raising rates. Their bandwidth cap would quickly affect many many users who aren't doing anything illegal. Second, the RIAA and MPAA and their outmoded way of thinking and their inability to adapt have grouped all P2P as evil. Since the RIAA and MPAA can't think rationally, they assume P2P is always wrong. These organizations have deep pockets and they will fight this just because it can be used for the illegal activities.

[jscott418]

I really don't see the need to dispute weather the majority of bit torrent content is illegal or not.
The fact remains that their is only so much bandwidth available and expanding this bandwidth appears to be slowing down. But my two cents on the content with bit torrent is that I personally believe much of bit torrents are illegal copyrighted material being distributed. After all the only non copyrighted material would be personal youtube like video produced by individuals. Most of what I see is TV shows, movies and software. All of which no matter what country they come from are copyrighted. But for me, the ISP's only concern should be to provide equal service to all of its customers and those that excessively download content and upload content should be paying more for it.

[NProszkow]

... And we do. I PAY for 20 MBit down and 5 MBit up. That is what I pay for and that is what I use. That is why all ISP's have different pay structures for consumers.

[Drubinson]

Have you been sleeping ? TOMORROW in Hokkaido, the USA is leading the other G-8 countries to pass the draconian and reprehensible ACTA- Anti Counterfeit Trade Agreement. This will make P2P ILLEGAL, criminalize BitTorrent and others, and create a global ENFORCEMENT agency to enforce it. More- it will implement drastic border checks of all memory devices- including ipods, cell phones, PDAs, and all computer hard drives. Your immediate attention is required to fight this. Thanks, DR

[Penguinisto]

Err, given the time-zone shift, it is "tomorrow" in Japan as of a few minutes ago (relative to PDT).

[anthony f wood]

Bit late I know but I was just checking out the ICC address to G8 and found it a tad disturbing,have a look at--iccwbo.org/uploadedFiles/ICC%20G8%20Hokkaido%20Toyako%20Summit.pdf -

[private-internet]

The problem is the ISP?s business model ? are they a common carrier or not. As a subscriber, I should be able to do what I like with my connection ? whether I am viewing a video or sharing with my friends. After all, it is still my Internet connection?

[Penguinisto]

No, they do not enjoy classic Common Carrier protections. OTOH: They do have DMCA Safe Harbor protections, and as long as they do not alter any user traffic based on content, they are regarded as safe from civil lawsuits involving a user's actions. ISP's do not want Common Carrier, because if they were, they would then have to be regulated entities. They OTOH do not want to be without any type of protection, hence the DMCA Safe Harbor and similar loopholes.

[jamalystic]

P2P will continue to pose a major dilemma for ISPs and whethet they will be able to circumvent this dilemma remains to be seen. Acouple of years back, P2P filtrs were making the rounds, touting their ability to solve this dilemma but als, as the report find out,it's all a money making business with no solution to offer: Peer-to-Peer Filters: Ready for Internet Prime Time?(http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=148803&F_src=flftwo)

[cohaver]

MCPLOT need to understand the need as a developer i use P2P to transfer my work and research via P2P. Also Torrent type exchanges verify each set of Data for errors and builds it back in the correct way. OSI stack does the same thing in HTML but is limited to standard Data types it cant verify Video correctly. Spam and malware makers understand this
Total understanding of Formats exchange services is needed by ISP's and RIAA . If the Data blocks at the foundation readers are poor trying to lock them out is stupid a new format or correction protocol can be made to unlock ISP controls. So work with and build a foundation group of protocols with all parties is needed. And as far as stealing copy righted material in house Hollywood is to blame 99% of all good copies of movies and music was posted by Hollywood RIAA members or their maids or others people who have access to post dated material . The manufacturing Factories Security.
Sometimes the Big Fish mite be in your own company next time you kick that mail boy in your office for a damage letter or Maid didn't clean good it only takes few seconds to copy data with right stuff.

[streamOG]

Nobody in their right mind is going to use a company to deliver their content who knowingly contributes to Global Piracy on a daily basis.

BitTorrent the company is a complete Scam. They have spent millions and millions of their investor's dollars trying to brand themselves as a content delivery company and have failed miserably.

There is more than enough network capacity to deliver video on the Internent using conventional CDN's and that is not going to change.

Akamai bought RedSwoosh and to date have not deployed it for a single customer.

Same thing with INTERNAP using Pando. Nobody wants P2P delivery because it sucks, it's not secure and conventional CDN is more reliable and affordable.

[BrettGlass]

Contrary to what BitTorrent falsely claims, P2P is not more efficient than conventional delivery methods. In fact, it's many times LESS efficient because it uses many connections, and many servers all over the net, to deliver the content. What's more, those servers are farther from the Internet backbone, and so have higher latencies and higher bandwidth costs. ISPs are right to fight against P2P as a method for video delivery, because the combination of large amounts of data (inevitable for video) and the huge inefficiencies of P2P mean a huge and unnecessary waste of network resources.

It's a simple and indisputable fact that P2P was originally invented for the purpose of making illegal, pirated copies of media, and -- contrary to a few claims above -- that really is what it is mostly used for, even now. (I know; I'm an ISP and we gather statistics. While we can't recognize everything that's illegal, the P2P traffic that we CAN recognize as indisputably illegal is already at least 80%. ) However, a new use of P2P is raising even greater concerns among ISPs: cost shifting by content providers, especially providers of high bandwidth content such as video.

It's important for users to understand this, because when costs are shifted to ISPs, the ISPs must ultimately pass them on to users. (They can't afford not to.)

When a P2P content provider (such as Vuze or even the BBC) gives a user "player" software, that software surreptitiously turns that user's machine into the content provider's server. (There's usually some mention that this is done in the fine print of the software "license," but who ever reads or understands those cryptic, endless documents? All that most users know is that they had to download the player to get the content.) The user's machine is slowed down as it sends out hundreds or even thousands of copies of the file that was received -- all without any payment to the user for the use of his machine or the user's ISP for the use of its network and bandwidth. And that bandwidth costs money! Unlike bandwidth in the "center" of the network, bandwidth at the "edges" -- at users' homes and businesses -- can easily cost hundreds of dollars per megabit per second per month.

The content providers really should be paying their freight and buying the bandwidth they need openly, rather than taking it from ISPs via a technique that's not much different than what spammers do when they set up "spambots." But the only way they'll do this is if the ISPs clamp down on P2P. That's what Comcast and other ISPs are doing.

"P4P" and other schemes which supposedly reduce the impact of P2P on ISPs are ultimately doomed to failure. Why? Because they still have all of the most important inefficiencies of P2P -- including high connection overhead -- and still shift costs to ISPs. Until the content providers pay for the resources they're using, there's no solution to the P2P problem.

As for video in general: remember, the Internet was never designed to carry video. In fact, it's the most inefficient medium imaginable for video, because a unique copy must be sent to every user (unlike broadcast media, where millions can receive the same signal at the same time). What's more, the Internet was never designed to be a "real time" medium. We'd all do much better to point dishes at a satellite which repeatedly broadcasts copies of media we might want to see.

The quality of current Internet video could be helped tremendously if players buffered content ahead (most, for some reason, don't, leading to a halting display) and if content was compressed more efficiently. A few minutes of preprocessing to squash the video just a little tighter could save terabits when it was distributed! Alas, none of this is being done, contributing to the current mess.

[ipollesion]

You tease me, Ithought the picture was a vide. I tried to steam it by pressing play.
How dare you. ;)

[Mike Acker]

ain't never gonna happen. the big boys are going to hear "let us supply your content to users from computers that are all over the place" and this is equivalent to legitimatizine the mess that is p2p out there now

i think there are good uses for p2p but this one ain't never gonna fly

[Mike Acker]

the most important capability of p2p is to provide us with the ability to publish openly material that would otherwise be censored by government for political reasons

p2p thus assumes the role of the old dial-up bbs: anyone can create one but you haqve to search the alleys and darkened saloons of cyberspace to find directions to the one you are interested in