June 23, 2008
Volume XXII, Issue 7
We Need to Embrace P2P Says VeriSign
Excerpted from The Times Online Report by Jonathan Richards
Having once been brought to its knees by Napster, the entertainment industry may have to look to peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for its future.
The smooth running of the Internet may depend on a technology that has been synonymous with unlicensed downloading and online copyright infringement, according to one of the foremost authorities on network infrastructure.
In order to accommodate the growing popularity of bandwidth-rich services, Internet users may be asked to host videos and other content on their home computers and then share that content with other computers whose owners want to access it.
The prediction - which would mean that the world's personal computers would become a giant P2P network - was made by VeriSign, which runs the largest so-called top-level-domain ".com."
By spreading content around the Internet, the network would be less likely to be crushed under the weight of demand for services on popular sites such as YouTube, which are visited by an increasing number of the world's 1.3 billion Internet users, VeriSign said.
"Ultimately, peer-to-peer networks are going to make the most sense to meet demand," Ken Silva, Chief Technology Officer at VeriSign, said.
"You're going to get to a point where streaming video to a billion homes from a single point is just not going to be possible. There may be a stigma attached to P2P but it may be necessary in order to distribute traffic."
P2P networks lighten the load on websites by allowing an Internet user to draw content from other personal computers on which the same content already resides. The technology was made popular by file-sharing services and has more recently been employed by Joost, an Internet TV service which has industry backing.
Mr. Silva also said that content providers would have to shoulder some of the cost of improving networks, echoing concerns expressed by Internet service providers (ISPs) that it was unfair that they should pay when the demand for bandwidth was being created by popular websites.
"They're going to have to update their delivery platforms," he said.
The countries where the Internet was feeling the most strain were in North Africa, parts of Asia, and the Middle East, he said. Developed countries were in a better position to handle the increased use of video services, but the need to find new ways to cope with demand was "becoming more pressing with every passing day."
According to Entanet, an ISP based in Shropshire, the cost of buying bandwidth from British Telecom (BT) has risen by 25% in the past year due to volumes, and is likely to increase by a similar amount in the next 12 months - largely as a result of increased use of video streaming on services like the BBC iPlayer. This is in spite of the fact that the cost of bandwidth has fallen dramatically over the last 24 months from $150 per Mbps to $20 per Mbps and is still falling.
Internet experts said popular sites were addressing the problem by using content distribution networks (CDNs) such as that provided by the company Akamai.
"If you take advantage of a network of thousands of servers that are distributed across the Internet, then you ship content - popular videos, for instance - to those servers and have it served locally," said Jay Daley, head of IT at Nominet, the operator of the ".co.uk" domain.
VeriSign said it had already made significant moves to improve the way traffic to .com sites was distributed, setting up servers in India, Cairo, and Paris to cope with demand in those areas. Now, only 20% of the traffic to .com sites from those regions had to leave the area, with the remainder handled by local servers.
In China, 95% of the traffic to .com sites was handled locally.
VeriSign said that every day, .com websites receive more than 35 billion requests for data and it predicted levels of 100 billion daily "queries" by 2010. The number of times a .com site was looked up has doubled every 18 months since 2000, it said.
Big Growth for the Internet Ahead Cisco Says
Excerpted from GigaOm Report by Om Malik
Cisco Systems has come out with a prediction: traffic on the world's networks will increase annually by 46% from 2007 to 2012, nearly doubling every two years. As a result, there will be an annual bandwidth demand of approximately 522 exabytes, or more than half a zettabyte.
Andrew Odlyzko, who has been tracking the growth of Internet traffic, said that he expects, overall, a slightly higher annual growth rate of some 50-to-60%.
This data is important to note, especially in the light of the recent tiered/metered broadband moves by US carriers.
Interesting findings from Cisco include: global IP traffic will reach 44 exabytes per month in 2012, compared to less than 7 per month in 2007 and 5 in 2002, which means that the volume of IP traffic in 2012 will be 100 times as large; monthly global IP traffic in December 2012 will be 11 exabytes higher than in December 2011, a single-year increase that will exceed the amount by which traffic has increased in the 8 years since 2000; mobile data traffic will roughly double each year from 2008 through 2012.
In 2012, Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried by the US Internet backbone in 2000. Representative of this trend, Internet video has jumped to 22% of the global consumer Internet traffic in 2007 from 12% in 2006. Video-on-demand (VOD), IPTV, peer-to-peer television (P2PTV), and Internet video are forecast to account for nearly 90% of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.
The continuous contribution of new economies - China, Brazil, Russia, India, Eastern Europe, and the new Nordic nations is a key driver. A growing number of subscribers and their usage of broadband and mobile broadband is slowly pushing up the demand for bandwidth, which has led to a huge spurt in the traffic on regional and international backbones. New fiber construction to support the growth in traffic also bolsters Cisco's claims.
China has already passed the US as the world's largest broadband and mobile market. India is getting there. VeriSign notes that India now has about 41 million Internet users, making it the eighth-largest Internet country.
Cisco notes that Internet traffic is growing fastest in Latin America, followed by Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, and says that's likely to be the case through 2012. After years and years of US domination, Internet traffic is beginning to act in a more global fashion.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 A new study called Music Experience and Behavior in Young People was released this week by British Music Rights (BMR), an organization representing UK songwriters and music publishers.
BMR CEO Feargal Sharkey said that the music industry should draw great optimism from this groundbreaking survey, and we agree.
The University of Hertfordshire, which conducted this seminal work for BMR, surveyed 773 respondents aged 12-24 of an estimated 9 million in this demographic group in the UK.
The survey found that young people are not only tech-savvy but also as enthusiastic about and as engaged with music as were prior generations.
They are also motivated by altruism, fairness, and reciprocity when it comes to sharing music tracks.
95% copy music in some way. 90% own an MP3 player with the average player containing 1,770 tracks, half of which are paid for.
70% of the core 18-24 group and nearly two-thirds of this entire segment download their music from P2P networks.
The average monthly download is currently 53 songs, with younger teens 14-17 downloading a greater number than the average.
80% of the P2P users said they would pay for a flat-rate service that would allow them to download, copy, and share music. But for an authorized P2P service to be competitive, it would need a catalog comparable to highly popular unlicensed applications.
Far fewer respondents were interested in a stream-on-demand service - where they could access any music they wanted, at any time, on any device, but would not be permitted to own a permanent copy of it.
P2P downloaders do so to get music for free, try-before-they-buy, obtain pre-released music, and search for rare or commercially unavailable music, such as concert bootlegs.
42% also upload music, with those under 25 most likely to do so. Those who upload do so mostly for altruistic reasons - to share with others and to recommend favorites.
Other major conclusions worth noting include:
There is a terrific opportunity for the music industry to grasp right now. This survey shows just how much respondents love and value music, and highlights that a significant amount of that value is currently unmonetized.
There are two types of relationships that this all-important, technologically savvy generation forms with music.
The first relationship is emotional. It forms when fans really connect to a piece of music or to an artist. They develop a bond and will be prepared to pay more for a specific item: the original CD, band paraphernalia, or concert tickets. The value to the music consumer in this case rests in the item itself or to the individual who produced it.
The second relationship is about experimentation. It is about trying-out, searching, exploring, investigating, giving something a go, rating, and recommending to others. The value to the music fan is in access to a large range of music for experimentation, and participation in a community of like-minded music lovers, rather than in any one track.
Technology makes it easier than ever before for people to copy and share music. According to our evidence, the majority download music using P2P file-sharing applications, half have copied the contents of their hard drive with friends, and a large minority allow their music to be shared by others online. Copying and sharing music amongst young people is culturally endemic.
As a result, the acts of copying, sharing, and recommendation have acquired a much greater value in their own right - a value from which consumer electronic and other digital businesses can derive significant revenues, but that music companies presently find difficult to monetize. To some extent, what in the offline world was considered "experimenting" or "testing" is, in an online environment, simply another form of consumption. The result is that the high emotional value invested in music does not translate into high amounts of spending on music.
This survey suggests that offering an access-based approach that enables people to trial, swap, and recommend music for a range of tariffs would be successful. 80% of those who admit to unauthorized file-sharing are prepared to engage with a licensed file-sharing service, and place a considerable monetary value on it.
Respondents seem to attach a hierarchy of value to different formats of music, with streaming on demand the least valuable (though still valued); ownership of digital files somewhere in the middle; and ownership of the original physical CD the most valuable. However, with respondents spending 60% of their total music budget on live music, it may be that "being there" is considered the ultimate music experience.
Survey responses suggest that respondents would continue to purchase CDs and go to gigs, even if they subscribed to a music industry sanctioned P2P file-sharing service. Fans want to support or pay tribute to their favorite artists and ownership of a digital music file does not necessarily do justice to their sense of devotion.
Less than half of all respondents had learned about copyright; and those who were aware of copyright were more likely to have picked up the information from informal sources (friends, newspapers, websites) than from formal lessons at school or university. Copyright education is important, particularly because the next generation of creators need to know how to exploit their asset; and the next generation of entrepreneurs needs to know how to get a return on its investment.
Half the respondents play a musical instrument, and of those, one third had uploaded their own original music onto a social networking website. They had the highest awareness of copyright.
For the music and technology sectors, the findings of this survey are likely to prove both challenging and a cause for optimism. However, there are clearly huge opportunities to realize the full potential of music in the digital market while satisfying the demands of both industry and fan alike.
In this sense, music is not alone. Other creative content industries are likely to face similar challenges and opportunities - if not now, then certainly in the near future.
Share wisely, and take care.
QTRAX Launches Free-and-Legal P2P Music App
Excerpted from WannaBeGeek Report by Brad Linder
Want to download popular music without paying and without breaking the law? QTRAX is a new advertising-supported service that lets you download music from two of the four major labels, Universal and EMI, as well as several smaller labels.
The service uses a modified version of the Songbird Media player to let you search or browse for music and download tracks. Some music will be available through P2P connections while music from Universal and EMI will be initially hosted on QTRAX servers.
The files use Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) and are designed to be played with the QTRAX media player. But once you play a song using the QTRAX software and acquire a valid license key, you should be able to play it using the media player of your choice.
The one thing you cannot do currently is transfer songs to a portable media device like an iPod. That makes sense, since QTRAX makes money by showing ads while you search for and listen to music. There's no particularly good way to do that on a mobile device.
The music selection is somewhat limited at the moment. Not only are Sony and Warner Music Group (WMG) tracks missing, but there are plenty of albums that show up in the QTRAX interface even though the songs are not yet available for download.
But since the service just launched in beta, we're willing to cut QTRAX some slack. The QTRAX client is Windows only for now, but a Mac version is in the works.
MediaDefender Pushes Free Tracks with Ads via P2P
Excerpted from Mashable Report by Paul Glazowski
MediaDefender, the ARTISTdirect owned entity that's been as friendly with big-name copyright owners as it has been a nuisance to the P2P world, is experimenting with an initiative to distribute legitimate MP3s, complete with branding, over file-sharing systems such as LimeWire. Yes, branding. Advertisers and record labels are purportedly working to bring marketing more fully into the offline playback process.
Of course, advertising and music have long been situated side-by-side. There have been radio and television deals secured, both in terms of commercials and singles playback. Live concerts also have their fair share of branding. And now on the web we regularly see three-way partnerships made among companies like CBS's Last.fm and marketers and media owners, some more successful than others.
In fact, one such well-publicized P2P experiment, dubbed QTRAX, is a project that offers free music downloads to be supplemented and entirely subsidized by marketing.
That being said, this weekend we hear perhaps the first mention of a pilot championed by MediaDefender to grant downloads to the P2P class supported by advertisers. The only past word given about MediaDefender's involvement in a large free-music giveaway of any sort was in 2007, when, as told by the NY Post, among others, telecom bigwig Sprint, Atlantic Records, and MediaDefender joined to distribute a reported 16 million tracks from a single artist's discography.
If MediaDefender is able to engage enough advertisers and record labels to distribute music of a popular variety, it will manage to see a good bit of success.
Though MediaDefender is more or less a household name among the technorati, it is presumably not a name which triggers a negative response from the average media consumer. If both music proprietors and advertisers are able to employ MediaDefender's logistical aid in getting music out to the masses in an efficient, lucrative way, this new program, if it indeed comes to be in an impactful way, will prove a success.
Terry McBride Faces the Millennials
Excerpted from Music Week Report by Robert Ashton
The man who coined the term millennials - and how the music industry can earn from them - is back in the UK next month to give a practical guide on how his principles can be applied.
Nettwerk Music Group CEO & Co-Founder Terry McBride recently published his "Meet the Millennials" report, which showed that companies need to alter their mindsets to cater to the behavior of the millennial generation - those born in the early 1980s.
In the MusicTank-commissioned report, McBride stresses that millennials demand content to be made available simultaneously across multiple formats. He also suggests this increasingly important demographic is more concerned with convenience and interactivity than ownership.
Having lifted the lid on the millennial, McBride will now take part in a one-off special experimental conference on July 17th at the Imagination Gallery in London. The event will generate a UK take on the report's conclusions as regard activating P2P communities, mash-up culture, and price-tipping points.
Uniquely, the conference will kick off a unique year-long project in which those participating will generate from scratch a mold-breaking 360 degree road-map for an up-and-coming British act.
McBride will kick off "Face-To-Face with The Millennials" with a keynote speech explaining why constant experimentation is key to success.
Following a Q&A, his views will be put to the test by 6Music presenter and songwriter Tom Robinson, interviewing a panel of UK millennials who will set the record straight on free music, online communities, aligning bands with brands and what's working for them. A presentation of relevant UK consumer research is in the process of being finalized.
Finally an act, its management, and leading representatives across the UK business - from digital distributors and e-tailers to marketers and live promoters - will work with McBride to create a year-long road map for the act. The band's progress will then be followed closely over the next 12 months.
Kid Rock Boycotts iTunes, Champions P2P
Excerpted from Wired News Report by Eliot Van Buskirk
The digital music revolution has been compromised, according to Kid Rock, because digital music stores and record labels still manage to hoard the lion's share of music revenue.
He advises fans to download his music for free from P2P services: "I want you to hear my music so I can play live."
Rock's tirade was apparently precipitated by a request from his record label, Warner Music Group's Atlantic Records, that he publicly denounce file sharing. His response: "Wait a second, you've been stealing from the artists for years. Now you want me to stand up for you?" Ouch.
It seems there's no one way that artists are responding to the opportunities and challenges presented by the Internet. They're all over the map when it comes to downloads, DRM, file sharing, and the rest of it, no longer offering the same rationales for completely different conclusions.
"ITunes takes the money, the record company takes the money, and they don't give it to the artists," added the country rock rapper.
Instead, he says, the Internet offers a "great opportunity for everyone to be treated fairly, for the consumer to get a fair price, for the artist to be paid fairly, for the record companies to make some money."
This makes a lot of sense, and it's the sort of thing that digital music optimists have been saying for years.
Kid Rock's iTunes boycott is in full effect. As of now, none of his Warner-era albums are available on iTunes, where only his rarely heard debut - 1990's "Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast" on Zomba Recordings - is available.
Expanding the View on Vuze
Excerpted from LA Times Report
A little more than a year ago, the creators of Azureus - a file-sharing program based on the BitTorrent protocol - launched Vuze, a version that ignored bootlegs in favor of authorized copies of TV shows, movies, games, and other programming.
The idea was to create a file-sharing environment that content owners would want to participate in, and that would present less risky revenue streams. By focusing the software only on authorized files, Vuze could charge fees for files or sell advertising around them without fear of being sued for profiting from copyright infringement.
It soon attracted content from dozens of producers around the globe, including the BBC, PBS, and TOKYOPOP, although the major Hollywood studios largely kept their distance.
This month, Vuze did an about-face. Unleashing the software's search engine, it enabled users to find and retrieve content indexed by some of the world's most popular BitTorrent search engines. These include Mininova, an index site in the Netherlands now under legal assault from Dutch anti-piracy authorities.
As a result, users don't have to fire up a second file-sharing program to find free, unlicensed versions of the titles Vuze offers on a pay-per-view basis. They can do it through Vuze's search engine.
CEO Gilles BianRosa acknowledged that the move didn't meet with universal acclaim from the companies providing content on Vuze. Yet he said that the change merely acknowledges the reality of the marketplace, and argued that it would help content owners compete better with online bootleggers.
"We are not creating a new consumer behavior" by letting users search for files in unlicensed waters, BianRosa said.
"Many, if not most, of our users already are searching the web for content, including through one of the numerous existing torrent sites. By introducing our new meta-search functionality, we are for the first time giving content providers the ability to offer their content as a direct alternative to potentially unlicensed content, right where users may be searching for them. We have thus created a forum where content owners can engage directly with the people who are actively looking for their content, and offer them a compelling alternative."
He's got a point there. Hollywood has to compete with bootlegged content online, period. For years the studios and major record companies have refused to offer legitimate copies alongside unauthorized ones, insisting that any P2P operator sanitize the network (more or less) before they would sign a licensing deal. But you can't stop your kids from eating junk food just by keeping it out of your cupboards. They know too many other places to find it, and that's probably the first place they look, anyway.
Said BianRosa, "Ultimately, Vuze and content owners have the same goal - drive users to licensed, monetized content. We believe that a higher-quality experience, combined with increased visibility of licensed content can ultimately outperform piracy. When presented with incredible content and a great product experience, we believe that people will do the right thing."
It will be interesting to see whether Vuze can build its lineup of content partners with the new version of its software. Another added feature makes it easier for Vuze users to recommend the files they like to their friends, which could bring some viral-distribution love to said content partners. Of course, thanks to the new search capabilities, users can now point their friends to bootlegged files, too. And guess what - the messages are encrypted to deter snooping.
Cubit P2P Search Protocol Could End Infringing Indexes
Excerpted from Ars Technica Report by Nate Anderson
In popular perception, BitTorrent is a decentralized protocol; after all, all that data is coming from other peers and not from a central server, right?
But because searching for particular files on BitTorrent networks can be a dodgy proposition, most BitTorrent users rely on torrent indexes like those provided by The Pirate Bay, giving the system a central choke point.
Shut down the torrent aggregators and files become much more difficult to find, so it's no surprise that content owners have recently targeted aggregators like Demonoid, OiNK, and the aforementioned The Pirate Bay.
Now, a new project out of Cornell University hopes to provide good quality, approximate keyword searching directly through BitTorrent networks - a truly decentralized system that doesn't rely on aggregators.
Cornell's Cubit project is the brainchild of graduate student Bernard Wong, his advisor Emin Gun Sirer, and Microsoft Research's Aleksandrs Slivkins.
The goal of the project, in the words of its authors, is to provide "an efficient, accurate and robust method to handle imprecise string search in file-sharing applications."
Wong said that the motivation is misspellings, both in searches and file names, and he pointed to Google stats showing that a full 20% of Google searches for Britney Spears spell the singer's name incorrectly.
P2P applications can perform searches, but most aren't very good at it. Distributed hash tables (DHT) are one common approach, but these are generally good only at finding exact matches due to the nature of hashes.
Building an approximate DHT search system by iterating through all possible spelling variations of search queries is, in the understated terms of the Cubit team, a "highly inefficient solution."
So most users just visit aggregators, but as Wong points out, such sites are getting raided or sent takedown notices and provide a centralized failure point. While the team doesn't advocate copyright infringement, they are concerned with building robust and truly decentralized P2P networks, and they see approximate keyword search as being crucial to that effort.
Yes, it's a "very cool research problem," as Wong put it, but it's also a chance to build the sort of decentralized search that could one day do what the RIAA and MPAA have so far failed to do: make The Pirate Bay irrelevant.
"We do hope that this type of system can be used in place of a centralized aggregator," Wong said, but that day is still a long way off.
Aggregators have the potential to offer more metadata and offer better organization than Cubit, which relies on data from file names and the comments sections of files.
To start, the team built a Vuze plug-in for Cubit to demonstrate the technology. With the plug-in installed, Cubit creates a lightweight overlay network that exists in parallel with BitTorrent, but is used only for searches. Cubit's central insight is the abandonment of hashes, which are only good at detecting identical matches, and instead building a network based on "edit distance."
Edit distance is "equal to the minimum number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions needed to transform one string to another."
All files on all machines running Cubit are given a node ID and the computer builds an internal map of all the nodes based on their edit distance from one another. When a search is accidentally run, nodes with the lowest edit distance from the word appear first in the results list. This is grossly simplified; tech heads who want to read about "Levenshtein distance" and "small-world construction" should check out the official paper describing Cubit.
Because of the way that the node map is created, searches also don't require querying every peer in the network and are claimed to require an entire order of magnitude fewer queries than DHT systems while providing more useful results. In addition, the system works for any language in which a "word similarity metric" (the edit distance) can be defined, so nothing about it is particular to English.
So why choose "Cubit" for a project to build approximate search into P2P apps? Wong says that the team needed a name, the system relies on "edit distance," and cubit is an old unit of measurement. The name seemed "fitting."
While the system, when complete, should make it simple to find and start torrent downloads without utilizing an index, Wong points out that it's not a boon to would-be copyright infringers. It makes it neither any harder nor any easier for investigators to find the IP addresses of people sharing files; they just need to search the network rather than the index.
But what Cubit can do is force content owners to go directly after end users who are sharing particular files rather than simply trying to shut down the biggest indexes in order to hobble BitTorrent, bringing torrent search into the full decentralized world.
Film2home Rolls Out New Service
Excerpted from World Screen News Report by Irene Lew
Film2home, an electronic-sell-through and VOD movie portal based in the Nordic region, has launched a new file-sharing service, film2home P2P, which is based on BitTorrent technology.
With the rollout of this new service, film2home aims to make it easier for people to download movies via file-sharing software.
Users who share the purchased file with other film2home customers will receive money, depending on how large the file is and how many other people are distributing the same file. The more movies that one shares, the more money one receives in his or her account. The money can be used to purchase and download more movies, or can be taken out in cash.
Film2home P2P was developed in cooperation with the movie service Ameibo.
Cecilia Versteegh, Founder of film2home, said, "We have for a long time tried to develop solutions using file-sharing technology in a way that is accepted by film studios. As a first step we offer approximately 1,000 movies, but we hope to increase the catalog with more movies from major studios as soon as possible."
"We try in every way to create the largest service for downloading and streaming in the Nordic region, and we are convinced that consumers want to pay if movies are available in an easy way."
Digicorp Brings P2PTV to China Youth Net
Digicorp's wholly owned subsidiary Youth Media Limited has entered into a 20-plus-10-year Cooperation Agreement for exclusive advertising and media rights with China Youth Net (CYN). This contract uniquely positions Digicorp to market to China's massive but hard-to-reach student population online, on campus and via mobile.
CYN is the Chinese government agency which oversees Internet activity for China's student population of more than 70 million young people between the ages of 14 and 28. CYN will be primarily responsible for providing the required government licenses and regulated services including campus and technical access as well as content approval services.
The broad ranging contract includes the exclusive use of one of only a handful of China's highly sought after Online Broadcasting Licenses which Digicorp will use to build and launch a large scale premium content delivery network targeted to students via peer-to-peer television (P2PTV).
The new network will initially target the campus-based student population, estimated at 45 million young people, who make up China's most active online community and are a valuable segment within the country's next generation of consumers. Additionally, the agreement grants Youth Media the rights to extend the campus media and advertising delivery onto mobile handsets in the future.
"Our partnership with CYN marks a new and exciting era for Digicorp," commented Jay Rifkin, Digicorp's CEO. "This sets the company firmly in China's youth media marketplace with a strong combination of unique assets to immediately put to work and also build on for the future."
Digicorp, Inc. is a China focused youth marketing and media company whose business is to deliver advertising and content to one of the most sought after and fastest growing demographics in the world. Digicorp's business is to provide advertisers and corporations with direct and centralized access to China's massive but hard-to-reach student population.
PPLive: Huge, Profitable, and Barely Known
Excerpted from NewTeeVee Report by Gannes
PPLive has so many seriously stunning numbers, it's hard to choose which one to lead with. But 5 million concurrent live streamers might be it.
PPLive is sort of the Joost of China, in that its product is a P2P software client that delivers Internet television - both live and on-demand.
But in part because few Chinese people have cable subscriptions, it already has 100 million installations and 20 million active users, who spend an average of 11 hours per week.
James Seng, the company's VP of International, appeared on a panel at the Supernova conference in San Francisco this week.
PPLive has some 900 live channels and 700 videos-on-demand. It has to compete with widespread piracy in China, but offers old seasons of television, local TV programming, and plenty of sports video.
It has content deals with CCTV, MTV, ESPN, Time Warner, the NBA, and more.
Seng said PPLive has some 250 employees and is profitable. The company began showing advertisements on its content last year, and gets low CPMs, but has enough viewer hours to make them count, said Seng.
Seng's job is to get the word out about PPLive stateside and recommend whether it should launch locally, acquire a company that already has a US presence, do a joint venture, or license its technology. We'll be watching to see what he decides.
Joost CEO: We've Figured it out This Time
Excerpted from Silicon Alley Insider Report by Michael Learmonth
Two years ago, in the wake of Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, Joost was supposed to solve a very 2006 dilemma: fearful media companies wanted to distribute their video over the Internet, but didn't know how they'd do it.
But that was then. Now TV networks are happy to distribute their content, via conventional websites, as widely as possible. And that makes Joost, which requires an unwieldy download before users can play a single second of video, looks like a clumsy solution for a non-existent problem.
Now Joost has a shot to reinvent itself, via a new service that launches within a web browser - just like every other web video service. That product is weeks away from launch, CEO Mike Volpi tells us, and this time he thinks his company has figured it out.
Silicon Alley Insider: What mistakes did Joost make the first time around and what are you doing to fix them?
Mike Volpi: We introduced what was the 2006 vision of the best product out there. The product came to market and I think we learned a lot of things from it. We're the first to say it didn't exactly hit the sweet spot. We have a great brand and great content that we still have access to today. But we had a product that wasn't quite right.
SAI: When you started out, you had by far the most content of any legal aggregator on the web. Now content is everywhere, so where does that leave Joost?
Volpi: The world has migrated from an exclusive model of content distribution to a non-exclusive model. Our view is that content is available in a lot of places, but by packaging it and merchandising it better, hopefully we will be a better place to come to. As people come to us, the content owners will say "I'm not going to upload this to 25 places" - they won't be bothered - "I'm just going to upload it two or three places." That will give us an advantage - not because we have contractual exclusivity, but because it's a place people like to go to.
SAI: How will Joost be different from a Hulu, Veoh, or AOL TV?
Volpi: We are designing a platform that is hopefully well-suited to large content owners, but also one that will serve the purposes of the midtail - the indie content, music videos, comedy channels, and so on. There are users out there that don't know what they are going to watch today, or they want to browse in a genre. We will help them find what they're looking for. We host a lot more indie content than Hulu - and we are doing a lot more work to distribute and sell advertising on that content.
SAI: Do you need to do more content deals to be successful?
Volpi: Today we have 7,500 hours - one of the largest portfolios out there. We'd love to have more, but our success or failure will not be dictated by signing another deal.
SAI: You raised $45 million in 2006 and sources tell us you've been in talks to raise another round of financing. Is that true?
Volpi: No. We have ample cash to get the platform out, work out the kinks and accumulate users. If all goes well hopefully we won't have to raise any more money. A lot of it depends on how quickly we grow. Rapid international expansion would require more capital. The pace of rollout of territories will determine if and how much more funding we might need.
SAI: What kind of ad rates will you need to charge in order to make your service profitable?
Volpi: I am convinced with our business model that TV-level CPMs will work just fine. Online CPMs are higher now, but they will fall back to TV levels. When you operate P2P, you save on three things: bandwidth, storage, and CPU capacity. It is harder if you look at the "buy-your-own bandwidth, buy-your own-servers" model, which we're not doing. We have cost advantages, which is particularly important in a non-exclusive market. The margins are going to be thin in this industry for an aggregator like us. The first job is to get users but long-term we have to make money. Having a low-cost delivery system is the survival strategy for a content aggregator.
SAI: The last time you launched, it was a big media event. Any plans for a splashy relaunch?
Volpi: It was a different situation, because we had two founders who were so well-known. We were very fortunate that we got the enormous coverage and frankly we still have a wonderful brand because of it. But the expectations pinned on us were so high. It was a difficult situation to manage. Organizing a big party might get us a few headlines, but trust us, we've been through the PR cycle before. We want the product to speak for itself and then let the users speak for us.
Israel's Top ISP Offers Superior Internet Video with Oversi
Oversi, a pioneer of over-the-top (OTT) caching and delivery solutions, announced this week that the top Israeli Internet service provider (ISP), Netvision 013 Barak, has installed the OverCache Multi-Service Platform (MSP) to support the growing demand for online video services.
Since installation, OverCache MSP has saved on international bandwidth allocated for OTT video by around 80%;speeded up download times of customers' online video files by over four times (average speed was reduced from 40 to 8 seconds); and provided a smoother customer viewing experience for online video without interruptions.
OverCache MSP offers a "one-stop-shop" temporary caching solution for online media content. By caching temporary content from the Internet, OverCache MSP enables Netvision 013 Barak to improve customers' quality of experience (QoE). It also defers costly infrastructure upgrades.
Tovi Canor, VP Engineering of Netvision 013 Barak, said, "Customers are demanding more and more video over the Internet. Oversi's solution enables us to offer the best online video experience to our customers with less bandwidth, increasing customer satisfaction and strengthening our competitive advantage. Since installation, OverCache MSP has shown consistent high performance and delivered notable bandwidth savings."
Qnap & BitTorrent Unveil New High-Speed NAS Series
Excerpted from ChannelTimes Report
Qnap Systems recently joined hands with BitTorrent to enable a new powerful P2P download engine embedded in its all-in-one Turbo Network Attached Storage (NAS) series - the TS-109 II, TS-209 II, and TS-409.
With enhanced download performance, it aims to replace PC-based download solutions. The DHT, TCP and UDP tracker protocols, and the encryption mode are all supported in the new download engine.
The Turbo NAS series is built on a Linux-embedded OS, which is stable and less vulnerable to hackers and is ideal for 24/7 operations. The TS-109 II series and TS-209 II series consumes only 14.4 W and 29.3 W respectively in operation - saving up to 80% of the power consumption.
The TS-409 series is an ideal solution for mass storage, file download, and multimedia sharing center.
Shawn Shu, VP of Qnap said, "Currently, people are using PCs for BitTorrent downloads. However, this can induce a high cost of energy consumption. We strongly believe that our energy-saving Linux-embedded NAS will become an ideal alternative to replace the PC as a download server as well as help protect the earth.
Doug Walker, CEO of BitTorrent said, "BitTorrent is playing an integral role within the growing ecosystem of connected consumer electronic solutions in the home, through our BitTorrent Certified Program. We are teaming with Qnap and other device manufacturers to provide consumers a seamless way to access and enjoy the Internet's richest media - with or without a PC."
Ixia Introduces Scalable, Realistic P2P Simulation
Ixia, a leading, global provider of IP performance test systems, this week announced the industry's most realistic and scalable simulation of P2P service traffic.
Ixia's IxLoad' P2P solution gives service providers the ability to validate the effect of P2P traffic on revenue-generating services at citywide scale. It also enables network equipment manufacturers to thoroughly test the accuracy and reliability of the detection and classification mechanisms of deep packet inspection (DPI)-capable, application-aware devices.
P2P traffic produces between 30-and-60% of worldwide Internet traffic and, as a result, can negatively impact the quality of experience (QoE) of mission-critical services such as voice and video. To track and manage P2P consumption of bandwidth, service providers rely on DPI-capable devices.
DPI enables service providers to gain much better visibility into how subscribers are using broadband services, thus helping to determine what kind of new services should be offered in the future. Better visibility into the network also translates into improved performance, troubleshooting, and security monitoring.
Ixia's P2P solution, in conjunction with other multi-protocol emulations, can be used to validate the bandwidth management and QoS schemes deployed to ensure quality of experience (QoE) is optimized for all users on the network.
Isocore, a leading technology validation and certification laboratory, used Ixia's P2P solution to validate quality of service (QoS) performance of 10 Gbps application-aware devices. Application-layer forwarding is a very complex and resource-intensive task, making it critical to validate performance at line rates up to 10 Gbps.
"The P2P emulation provided by IxLoad simplifies the creation of real world test environment for verifying inline DPI solutions," said Rajiv Papneja, Director of Isocore. "The intuitive user interface, coupled with the capability to emulate many P2P flows in addition to built-in set of libraries further simplifies the usage and test configurations."
P2P is a very efficient and resilient method of distributing content over IP networks. Increasingly, content providers are beginning to use P2P distribution technology to distribute popular commercial fare such as video. One such content provider is TVBank, based in Japan, focused on video content acquisition and video streaming systems.
Ixia provides an intuitive solution enabling engineers to simply turn a dial to scale up subscriber and bandwidth load. In addition, Ixia's P2P emulation capabilities mimic a variety of P2P traffic flows at user-defined parameters, including numbers of peers, connection rates, concurrent connections, and throughput.
"IxLoad offers an elegant mechanism for modeling the dynamic nature of subscribers, thereby ensuring complete test realism," said Anupam Sahai, Ixia's Vice President of Marketing. "The ability to dial to scale, combined with the ability to measure QoE on a per-subscriber basis, makes IxLoad's P2P emulation capabilities a valuable solution for validating service delivery networks."
IxLoad 4.0 is a highly scalable, integrated test solution for assessing the performance of multiplay networks and application-aware devices such as load balancers, firewalls, cache engines, and security devices equipped with DPI technology. IxLoad creates a truly converged traffic mix to measure the effectiveness of application-aware devices at peak performance levels.
AT&T and Verizon Say FCC Net Neutrality Principles Work
Excerpted from CNET News Report by Marguerite Reardon
Executives from AT&T and Verizon Communications said Tuesday that it's important for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to take action in the Comcast debate over slowing down certain forms of P2P traffic in order to prove that legislation is not necessary when it comes to net neutrality.
Jim Cicconi, Senior Executive Vice President for Legislative Affairs for AT&T, and Tom Tauke, Executive Vice President of Public Affairs and Policy for Verizon, told an audience at the NxtComm trade show that it's important for the FCC to make a decision in this case to show that the agency's net neutrality principles are enough to keep service providers honest.
"It's in the best interest of the industry for the FCC to make a judgment on the Comcast/BitTorrent case," Tauke said. "None of us want to be in a world where there is a sense that nobody is watching what is going on. We have the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, which have authority to enforce some policies in this area. And if they do their jobs properly, they can make positive contributions on how the Internet develops."
Cicconi agreed, saying that the FCC has the opportunity to prove to net neutrality supporters and Congress that it can enforce its own policies and keep the Internet open.
"The Comcast case has brought the debate over net neutrality into specifics," Cicconi said. He added that this is important because up until now the discussion has centered on hypothetical problems. And creating new laws to deal with problems that haven't yet occurred could be disastrous for the industry.
Coming Events of Interest
Voice Peering Forum - June 23rd-24th in San Francisco, CA. This conference brings together over one-hundred organizations from the information technology (IT) and telecommunications industry to network and discuss the latest in peering, routing, and interconnection of networks and the applications they support. DCIA Member companies Kontiki and Abacast are participating with a special session.
P2P MEDIA SUMMIT SV - August 4th in San Jose, CA. The first-ever P2P MEDIA SUMMIT in Silicon Valley. Featuring keynotes from industry-leading P2P and social network operators; tracks on policy, technology and marketing; panel discussions covering content distribution and solutions development; valuable workshops; networking opportunities; and more.
Building Blocks 2008 - August 5th-7th in San Jose, CA. The premier event for transforming entertainment, consumer electronics, social media & web application technologies & the global communications network: TV, cable, telco, consumer electronics, mobile, broadband, search, games and the digital home.
International Broadcasting Convention - September 11th-16th in Amsterdam, Holland. IBC is committed to providing the world's best event for everyone involved in the creation, management, and delivery of content for the entertainment industry. Uniquely, the key executives and committees who control the convention are drawn from the industry, bringing with them experience and expertise in all aspects.
Streaming Media West - September 23rd-25th in San Jose, CA. The only show that covers both the business of online video and the technology of P2PTV, streaming, downloading, webcasting, Internet TV, IPTV, and mobile video. Covering both corporate and consumer business, technology, and content issues in the enterprise, advertising, media and entertainment, broadcast, and education markets. The DCIA will conduct a P2P session.
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