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EU Aims To Replace TV with Live BitTorrent Streaming
New technology increases bandwidth possibilities for live streaming

Researchers in 21 different European nations have come together to create a project designed to bring live BitTorrent streaming to the Internet and to change the way that content is viewed by the average consumer. The $22 million project, called P2P-Next, is a zero-server solution that combines traditional BitTorrent streaming with new technology dubbed Give-To-Get which rewards people with bandwidth for sharing on the site. The hope of these researchers is that the new technology will allow users to stream content to thousands of people using only the same amount of bandwidth that would be used now to stream to only one or two people. The testing has just begun and the code for the new technology isn’t even expected to be stable for another month or so but the researchers are actively hoping to be able to implement this new product soon.

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azzmuncher
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azzmuncher

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wowza

nice, i like!

FFH5
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FFH5

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ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

»torrentfreak.com/p2p-nex ··· -080718/
If the technology turns out to be a success, broadcasters can save millions of dollars each year on video streaming projects. ISPs on the other hand will be less excited, because they now pay for this bandwidth.
Just another project pushed by content providers trying to shift costs to the ISPs. It makes the content providers look good and they don't care how it makes the ISPs look.

But from a customer viewpoint, all this will do is raise costs and prices for the ISPs. End result: more ISPs signing on wholeheartedly to the tiered pay by byte business model. Bring on the caps!!!
basquiat6
join:2008-04-04
Montreal, QC

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basquiat6

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Re: ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

Dear science, this will not only show P2P and torrent technologies to be efficient and legal means of transferring data but it might also require ISP's to provide the bandwidth that their customers have paid for, the horror, the horror.
EPS4
join:2008-02-13
Hingham, MA

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EPS4

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Re: ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

Of course, if ISPs have to provide the bandwidth the customers have "paid for" 24/7, then they'll have to provide less bandwidth (substantially less), or bill by the byte.
jarthur31
join:2006-04-14
Carlsbad, NM

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Nope. Torrent technology is unholy and extremely illegal! Where you living, under a rock??

dadkins
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MVM
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Last time I checked, I pay my bills.
I am paying for downstream and upstream.
This form of delivery is paid for by me and whomever is uploading/downloading to/from me.

The reasoning that some try and state that the ISP has to pay for it, baffles me.

What exactly does the check you send your ISP pay for?
Mine pays for me to connect and use up/down bandwidth, right?

So, if I decide to upload *PART* of a show to you on my *PAID FOR* connection, how is this costing the ISP?

FFH5
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FFH5

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Re: ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

Do we have to go over this again and again. The ISPs oversubscribe number of customers. They CAN'T provide max bandwidth to all their customers 24x7, especially on uploads.

You didn't buy 24x7 access to max bandwidth no matter what you claim. That is NOT in the TOS.

If the content providers win the LEGAL right to force ISPs to provide max bandwidth 24x7, then the PRICE will skyrocket. And that is a FACT.

So you can make all the claims you want and throw copies of checks to the ISP up here in the thread. But it won't change reality. If the P2P model prevails, prices will rise and will rise drastically.

SO if you get what you claim is your due, then get out the checkbook and start writing bigger and bigger checks.
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Austin, TX

iansltx

Member

Re: ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

Okay, let's see here...

If the software does things right then you can select a share ratio, where above a certain pint your connection cuts off. Most BitTorrent clients will only "seed" (upload only) until the person downloading the torrent has "paid for" the data they've used, plus 50 to 100%.

Now take into account that the software culd be set up (hint: live streaming) so that only people who are actually watching stuff will download it (no content hording) your download count is equal to your viewer count and thus, unless there are a lot of people just shutting off their connections or having them shut off, you'll end up with a share ratio of around 100%.

This means that if a person downloads an hour of HD content (which can be hit into 700 MB if we're just talking high quality, but throw-away, media) they'll "cost" the ISP only 1.4 GB of data, 700 down, 700 up. 1.5 if you have hashfails or suchlike.

So if the P2P stuff is governed by software that is intelligent about bandwidth and such, the internet won't break (you scurvy pay-by-byte scoundrals out there pushin' yer agendas), it'll just become less centralized, more resilient and, with such stuff as the P4P initiative, better able to take advantage of ultra-high-speed connections like FiOS offers. This in turn provides customers a reason to upgrade to higher data tiers (fast downloads of multimedia or such) and the ISP gets more money. How can that be bad?

Also, what's this BS about uplink capacity being more congested than downlink? Granted, it's on a small scale, but if you look at some of these small ISPs that publish traffic reports they tend to have a more constant flow of upload data, yes, but it's generally 30-50% of the download amounts. This is with the ISP website hosted on the ISP's own infrastructure.

Besides, the highly asymmetric nature of consumer broadband makes sure, to an extent, that uploads won't overwhelm the network, or so it seems. Remember, once you get beyond the CMTS or the DSLAM, ISP backbone connections are almost always symmetric, so unless they're hosting crap with that extra b\w it's available to consumers, especially if they're doing legal stuff.

Heck, Revision3 uses BitTorrent as an alternate distribution method for their media. If the content is really good and such, only as many people will download it as will watch it at some point. Those same people add a little bit to the "swarm" speed for download to other users. The central server chips in now and then to ensure an optimal download experience.

Ya see, BitTorrent was created as a content distribution network replacement, but not as a replacement for a system that has one centralized server where content is always available. It would alleviate the massive burden of centralized serving of video events that would otherwise only be viewable in broadcast form, by equally stressing more of the "tubes". This would allow, say, ten thousand people to simulteneously watch a one-megabit stream that ten thousand other people ha started watching, or had downloaded, earlier. The same action would require a large fram of centralized servers and a port to the internet larger than some providers' national backbones.

That's the beauty of distributed computing and distributed content delivery via BitTorrent. That's what the tech was made for, and if there's a problem with that then ISPs need to upgrade their networks to cope. Maybe give the $40k 10GE people (Cogent) some new customers in the process, but any way you look at it improve the internet's capacity and accentuating the traits that have made the internet the unstoppable force that it is today.
clickie8
join:2005-05-22
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For the first time, I'm finding myself agreeing with your post. However, you're not considering one important fact about this plan and that is that I don't think they are attempting to make this a linear transmission method. Or put another way, it isn't real time.

If that's the case, then do not underestimate the amount of programming that can be pushed while people are sleeping or at work. In that sense, the efficiency of the system is quite high because it'll do a lot more work when network utilization is lowest. Furthermore, this is the ideal ala-carte TV transmission system.

Certainly, you are correct in that it pushes the transmission costs directly upon the viewer. But those who are interested in receiving their programming in this fashion are already prepared to pay the costs. Those who are not will still rely upon OTA.

As far as oversubscribing, it's time for consumers and broadband ISPs to get with reality. Nothing on this planet is unlimited and there is no reason to think broadband internet access is somehow exempt from that. If you want a fat pipe to grab your entertainment, then you should be prepared to pay for it. However, broadband ISPs should also realize that they can't use this as an excuse to prop-up older business models that might see a decline in revenues from competing transmission systems. It's not unlimited, but it's also moving toward becoming a commodity. There is no reason to cap someone at 250 gigabytes of transfer per month for $80 and then start billing $2 for each additional gigabyte.

dadkins
Can you do Blu?
MVM
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said by FFH5:

Do we have to go over this again and again. The ISPs oversubscribe number of customers. They CAN'T provide max bandwidth to all their customers 24x7, especially on uploads.

You didn't buy 24x7 access to max bandwidth no matter what you claim. That is NOT in the TOS.

If the content providers win the LEGAL right to force ISPs to provide max bandwidth 24x7, then the PRICE will skyrocket. And that is a FACT.

So you can make all the claims you want and throw copies of checks to the ISP up here in the thread. But it won't change reality. If the P2P model prevails, prices will rise and will rise drastically.

SO if you get what you claim is your due, then get out the checkbook and start writing bigger and bigger checks.
Nowhere did I ever claim to have the right to full-on speed 24/7.
Whereas you seem to think that is what is needed for BT to work. Wrong!
At NO TIME have I ever maxed out my upload when using BT.
There is no need to - that's how the swarm works!

I supply x amount, as does many others - nets the downloader serious speed on the download.

Right now, if I were to go for... whatever, I would get small parts, and sometimes SLOW speed for those parts for the file I have requested.
But, since I am getting MANY parts from MANY people, the download happens rather fast.
This is how it works.
One doesn't have to max out ones connection 24/7 to help out, not to mention, there is the whole throttling ability in most BT clients(but it's never needed or used here).

Hope this clears up some of the confusion for you!

funchords
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said by FFH5 See Profile* :

Do we have to go over this again and again. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah!!

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah BLAH, blah blah blah blah blah blah.

BLAH, blah blah blah blah blah.
Translation: Cable can't handle the bandwidth.

*For the humor impaired, my version of TK's quote above is a parody.

FFH5
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join:2002-03-03
Tavistock NJ

FFH5

Premium Member

Re: ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

said by funchords:
said by FFH5:

Do we have to go over this again and again. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah!!

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah BLAH, blah blah blah blah blah blah.

BLAH, blah blah blah blah blah.
Translation: Cable can't handle the bandwidth.
If you are going to include a quote by me in your post, please don't modify the quoted portion.

DataRiker
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join:2002-05-19
00000

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DataRiker

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Re: ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

You have just liked to a site you "discredited" no less than a few days ago.

Your amazing.

TK = fail

funchords
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Fair enough. Original fixed.

kamm
join:2001-02-14
Brooklyn, NY

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said by FFH5:
said by funchords:
said by FFH5:

Do we have to go over this again and again. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah!!

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah BLAH, blah blah blah blah blah blah.

BLAH, blah blah blah blah blah.
Translation: Cable can't handle the bandwidth.
If you are going to include a quote by me in your post, please don't modify the quoted portion.
But he didn't modify.
Kearnstd
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unless you can provide a solid seed though the torrent style media stream is set for epic fail when you have more watchers then senders, unless we have dirt cheap symetrical coming soon.

jaa
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jaa

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Re: ISPs would carry costs and won't be happy

said by Kearnstd:

unless you can provide a solid seed though the torrent style media stream is set for epic fail when you have more watchers then senders, unless we have dirt cheap symetrical coming soon.
It is not possible to have more watchers than senders. Watchers and senders are the same thing.

insomniac84
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Schererville, IN

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They already offered unlimited, no way they can migrate back to caps. We the people can legislate it away. It's not like an ISP is going to go under, it just means they can't gouge the cost of bandwidth and to say the ISP only sends one copy out is 100% wrong. They will send out multiple copies to the first wave of people to jump on and the second and third waves of people can download from the first wave and second waves of and the source. It will save the content provider bandwidth in the long run, but initially they still have to get the data out to first wave of people and to supplement the download speeds for the next couple of waves to keep their speeds fast. It would take 10 people uploading to match the download speed of the next person because download speeds are usually 10 times faster(or more) than upload speeds. And if the stream is short by the time you get enough people with all the data built up, they may be disconnecting. Which moves you closer to having to send a copy of the file to everyone.

NetAdmin1
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Which is why providers need to start changing their business models to deal with the future. The over subscription model of yesteryear is starting to become outdated, as are a whole bunch of assumptions that went into that model. Usage patterns are changing and will continue to change, and the way providers deal with subscribers and their usage need to keep up.

DataRiker
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SpaethCo
Digital Plumber
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Who wastes $22 million on this stuff?

Seriously, anyone who believes you can replace existing TV distribution for the masses with unicast flows needs a refresher course in both current available networking technology and basic math.
clickie8
join:2005-05-22
Monroe, MI

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clickie8

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Re: Who wastes $22 million on this stuff?

Or the system is non-linear and can take days to transmit an hour of programming. Or weeks. I don't see real-time TV over the internet as ever being viable because of the constraints of which you're thinking. However, stretch out the time for delivery and there's more possibilities.

I wouldn't mind having a Tivo-like box that catches my selected programs off the internet. It's more efficient to broadcast to me what I want as opposed to broadcasting what I want and what I'll never watch.

As Mr. TK has said, there's still the issue of broadband ISPs needing to add significant capacity to support everyone using even a non-linear system. But as someone who is tired of supporting cable channels that I'll never watch, this sounds like it might be a compromise method of finally getting ala-carte programming.
EPS4
join:2008-02-13
Hingham, MA

EPS4

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Re: Who wastes $22 million on this stuff?

The problem with a non-linear system like that you describe is time-sensitive programming, like news and sports games.

RARPSL
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said by SpaethCo:

Seriously, anyone who believes you can replace existing TV distribution for the masses with unicast flows needs a refresher course in both current available networking technology and basic math.
What is needed is to replace the current one show per channel (and even channel sharing SDV) with IPv6 MultiCasting using the same channel slots. Sending the shows via IPv6 to the set top boxes makes much better use of the channel slots than the current broadcast method.

funchords
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said by SpaethCo:

Seriously, anyone who believes you can replace existing TV distribution for the masses with unicast flows needs a refresher course in both current available networking technology and basic math.
While not unicast exactly, Cable companies are moving to switched video.

This whole article proves to me that the day of Cable's reckoning is coming -- they can either embrace it or resist it, but one of those choices is futile.

SpaethCo
Digital Plumber
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SpaethCo

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Re: Who wastes $22 million on this stuff?

said by funchords:

While not unicast exactly, Cable companies are moving to switched video.
SDV is analogous to multicast streams. The current VoD system *IS* unicast streams, but the engineering of the distribution system provides many times more bandwidth to that front than to HSI.
said by funchords:

This whole article proves to me that the day of Cable's reckoning is coming -- they can either embrace it or resist it, but one of those choices is futile.
If the day of reckoning is coming, it's not from the technology discussed in this article. Nor will it come from Vuze, or NetFlix, or XBL, or the PS3 store, or Amazon Unbox. An extreme minority of video content is currently being delivered on-demand (maybe less than 10%), and these Internet-based unicast delivery solutions are only going to capitalize on a small percentage of that. Even if you ignore the fact that broadband doesn't have the same reach as existing video distribution options, and that the majority of people with TVs don't have computers or other intelligent video widgets hooked up to them, and that broadband networks would need to be scaled about 10,000% to support this solution, you're still left with glaring holes of logic in pricing.

Are you seriously suggesting that an external company will be able to pay the various media companies for content, pay for servers, pay for Internet bandwidth, to be distributed to ISPs who also pay for head-end Internet bandwidth as well as their own local network infrastructure, and that solution will be cheaper than the cable companies buying from the media companies directly and distributing over their networks?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry that people can't see the blatantly obvious flaws in these "Internet video will take over the world" proposals.

funchords
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funchords

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Re: Who wastes $22 million on this stuff?

Once upon a time, people never thought that -- in the future -- Americans would prefer to pay a company to watch TV even though it was free over the rabbit ears.

SpaethCo
Digital Plumber
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SpaethCo

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Re: Who wastes $22 million on this stuff?

said by funchords:

Once upon a time, people never thought that -- in the future -- Americans would prefer to pay a company to watch TV even though it was free over the rabbit ears.
.. and even after that service was introduced, people continued to watch TV for free over rabbit ears. The advent of cable and satellite TV didn't make local broadcast TV irrelevant; in fact, they need to incorporate local broadcast TV into their service so people will even buy it. Moreover, there are still a lot of people to this day that only get their TV content over rabbit ears, which is why the DTV transition and the coupons are a big deal.

At least with cable and satellite TV people got extra channels for their money. What these researchers are talking about is using a more expensive solution to deliver people the same content they are getting today. The proposal is so ridiculously stupid that I'm amazed it got funding in the first place.

funchords
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funchords

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Re: Who wastes $22 million on this stuff?

$22 million in R&D is huge, I've gotta agree there.

ARGONAUT
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ARGONAUT

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Show Me The Cap!

US ISPs are blaming everything on P2P because their networks are inadequate.

I can't see this flying in the Colonies.
voipdabbler
join:2006-04-27
Kalispell, MT

voipdabbler

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Will be interesting to see how they limit access.

It you go to the P2P-Next site, you'll see that they note development will be within context of existing EU intellectual property laws and that P2P,as it currently exists, is viewed by intellectual property owners (media) as being primarily used for illegal file sharing. Seems like their system will have more controls. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a closed system where the "uploading" will be limited to verified intellectual property holders, not the general public. So, their model will be similar to the US, they will just use a different delivery technique--closed P2P--to deliver content once you've subscribed and paid, rather than streaming, which is probably better for the ISPs, with respect to bandwidth. They're not too clear on what forms of digital copyright management their files will contain, but you can be sure that there will be some form of copyright management to keep files from being usable on open P2P systems.

funchords
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funchords

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CABLE is DEAD.

This is reason #431 of why DSL and FIOS beats Cable Internet. Cable's piss-poor uplink architecture just can't handle new innovations like this.

Guspaz
Guspaz
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Guspaz

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Not going to happen.

BitTorrents advantages pretty much all disappear when dealing with live streams; you then become limited to the average upstream capacity in the network. In Ontario/Quebec, that'd be about half a megabit, which may or may not be barely enough for acceptable SD quality.

All the problems, however, disappear if you switch to IPv6. IPv6 makes multicast a required part of the spec, and so I'd expect that it'd be supported by pretty much any ISP that provided native IPv6 connectivity.

So, instead of spending $22 million on this research, I think they'd have been better off spending the money on encouraging IPv6 adoption. As soon as you have widespread access to multicast, you can do television broadcasting almost trivially.

SpaethCo
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SpaethCo

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Re: Not going to happen.

said by Guspaz:

All the problems, however, disappear if you switch to IPv6. IPv6 makes multicast a required part of the spec, and so I'd expect that it'd be supported by pretty much any ISP that provided native IPv6 connectivity.
Multicast is a required part of the IPv4 spec as well. Just because the feature is part of the spec doesn't mean you need to implement it (think QoS/ToS). I expect Internet adoption of multicast in v6 to be about as widespread as v4. (ie, nonexistent)