Netflix Launches Its Own Content Delivery Network 117
1sockchuck writes "Netflix has launched its own content delivery network to manage data delivery for its streaming video service. ISPs can choose to host caching appliances in their data centers, or peer with Netflix at Internet Exchanges. 'Netflix will provide either form of access at no cost to the ISP,' it said. As part of Open Connect, Netflix is sharing its hardware appliance design and the open source software components of the server. Does this mean Armageddon for the CDNs currently serving Akamai? Not really, according to analysts, citing the leverage Netflix had in dealing with providers."
The real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
will their new CDN work out that I'm not in the US more effectively?
What is the stat of peering these days? (Score:1)
Just as an aside to this conversation, how is peering doing these days? Back in the day, anyone with a big enough to have a massive pipe, like a T1, could peer with anyone else. What's the deal in this more mature environment?
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Not great, still plenty of exchanges around but few eyeball networks are willing to peer. Schools are generally the exception. The content networks are happy to peer.
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What about Comcast? (Score:5, Interesting)
So Comcast is going to roll over for this? Comcast is an integrated Cable TV/ISP, which wants to favor their own delivery mechanism and content relationships. Only Common Carrier status for Internet delivery will break that stranglehold - lots of luck for achieving that in the USA!
- Leonard
Re:What about Comcast? (Score:5, Interesting)
If Netflix can get its hardware inside Comcast's network, does that mean Comcast won't count it against their data caps?
Re:What about Comcast? (Score:5, Informative)
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The actual problem is Comcast's congestion is in the last mile. No amount of ISP caching will reduce last-mile congestion.
Last mile congestion is not Comcast's problem - they use fiber optic to their head ends and copper coax broadband drops to splits at the domicile that drive TV, cable modem, and/or DVR. The proof that this is not their problem? They do not count using their ISP service to deliver the same content that you get with their CTV, if you have a CTV subscription. (Although if you have a subscription you are more likely to watch via broadband rather than via internet, IMHO.) This uncapping is a scheme to keep custo
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I beg to differ. While most cable ISPs have a fiber network with tons of bandwidth, that last mile over coax will always have comparatively terrible bandwidth, especially upstream. They can split the network up by lowering the number of houses on each coax downstream, but that comes at an added cost of headend equipment and the like. It's a careful balance of cost/performance. The CDN would probably help a lot with upstream costs/bandwidth but it won't do diddly for congestion in the last mile.
I don't
Re:What about Comcast? (Score:5, Insightful)
During the whole L3 vs Comcast issue, L3 requested 270Gb of additional peering bandwidth. Remember, L3 is a tier1 back-bone. This means Comcast and send data to L3 and L3 will route that data to anywhere in the world. Being that Comcast and L3 have a peering agreement, it effectively means Comcast gets its internet for FREE. When L3 comes to you and offers you 270Gb of free bandwidth and you turn it down, that means you don't have an issue at your trunk. That's enough bandwidth for almost 70k 4Mb data streams
If Comcast doesn't have have congestion at their trunk, then the only other place is their last mile or their middle mile(or whatever it's called). When you own your own network or lease fiber, upgrading the "middle mile" is almost free. The logical conclusion is that the last mile is the bottle-neck.
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I only see one flaw in your comment.
If L3 requested 270Gb of peering bandwidth and Comcast turned it down.. you have at least one side of a network that recognized a need for 270Gb of bandwidth that is missing..
Given L3 vs Comcast i'd have to side with L3 as the intelligent network provider. Sure somethings up for Comcast to turn it down BUT i doubt they turned it down because its "not needed" from a raw network traffic perspective.
Also "if" all data being treated equal - the fact that these people who co
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The actual problem is Comcast's congestion is in the last mile. No amount of ISP caching will reduce last-mile congestion.
So basically you are claiming that ALL of comcast's congestion is in the last mile, and they have exactly zero congestion anywhere else?
That is the only possible combination of factors that would result in a local caching server not helping at all. It's also a physical impossibility.
Or are you just one of those types who thinks any small improvement must be no improvement at all because it isn't a 100% solution for any and all cases?
The type that turns down a $100 gift because that gift alone won't make yo
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Or maybe, just maybe, Comcast is like the cableco in my area and oversubscribing like mad while pocketing all the profits and not spending dick on upgrading squat?
You just described my ISP as well. I live in an area that's predominately apartments and condos, mostly young professionals, and our local node is so oversaturated that we can barely pull down 10% of our supposed 28 Mbps during peak times to the point where even standard definition Netflix or Youtube streaming is unwatchable from all the stopping and rebuffering required. The last service tech I had out told me to my face that this node has way too many individual users on it, but Charter won't replace or
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Re:What about Comcast? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, whenever the issue of those under-served towns getting municipal broadband comes up, the big ISPs like Comcast suddenly become very interested in developing there. Not enough to actually develop, mind you, but enough to lobby to squash the project on the grounds that it would be unfair competition. You know, should they ever decide to build there.
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Reminds me when Time Warner laid the smack down on North Carolina for even thinking of stepping onto their turf. Now us end users get to enjoy their monopolized service through the satisfaction of having a broadband connection that acts like a square wave.
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. Its sad but that's ISPs in America, too fucking greedy and shortsighted to see anything beyond the next quarter.
they can see beyond the next quarter most adequately. they will be using their influence to buy legislation to make community and municipal WISPs illegal...
Re:What about Comcast? (Score:4, Interesting)
FWIW when I got comcast (internet only if that matters)... they told me my area gets X amount of bandwidth, and they won't signup any more users, if you don't average the advertised speed. I pay for 20. early AM and late night (say before 8AM, and after 8PM) I can get 30-35 sustained... during peak hours, drops to about 15-17. last mile is not really an issue for me (and comcast is about the only high speed network in town - we have very little to no fiber where I live because of local politics)
as much as I want to hate them, they do deliver.. (and I haven't seen an outage in 3 years)
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Re:What about Comcast? (Score:4, Informative)
cap? what cap?
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/comcast-answers-data-cap-questions/ [arstechnica.com]
How has Comcast "killed" its caps? "Each of these pilot approaches will effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."
Will Comcast raise prices? "We offer tiers of service starting at $9.95 a month and ranging up to higher price tiers. We're very comfortable with the pricing. We don't have any current intention to change our pricing."
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comcast will still be capped, will still charge overages, will still try to screw over their customers every chance they get, and will still be hostile towards competitors' services and traffic. nothing has fundamentally changed:
and that $10 per month internet is only for certain, qualified low-income families.
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If you want a country where you can do anything you want if you have the money try Somalia or Afghanistan, I prefer to live in a society where the weak are given the same standards as the powerful.
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Re:What about Comcast? (Score:5, Insightful)
And the vast majority of those companies were given money by the government because for many years, every company they asked to serve those areas responded, "Hell, no". The free market works well when there are enough customers per square mile to make competition feasible. In more rural areas, true competition can't possibly work, which means the only viable alternative is a government-run last-mile infrastructure that leases access out to multiple competing ISPs.
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This is true, but how long would it take? Remember the old adage: you can have it fast, cheap, and good... but you can only pick two. The model you're proposing is cheap and (hopefully) good, but certainly not fast.
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Re:What about Comcast? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we can safely say what would have happened. Almost nothing. In the U.S., somewhere around a quarter to one fifth of the people are spread out across approximately 97% of the land mass, and the other 70-75% are concentrated in the remaining 3% of our land mass. Even with the best wireless technology we have at our disposal, covering much of the U.S. is infeasible because of geography (mountains, etc.). And the cellular phone industry has doubtless poured more money into wireless research than the total spending on ISPs nationwide.
Let's take my hometown in Tennessee as an example. Many of my friends did not have cable service because even with subsidies, it was not profitable. It costs about $30,000 to run a mile of coax or fiber, and in many places, that would serve only one or two households. Even if they stood to make $30 profit per month (unlikely), it would take over 40 years to break even, without factoring in such pesky things as interest.
So what about wireless? Realistically, most wireless Internet services cap out at somewhere on the order of ten miles or so. Assuming you placed a cellular tower ($150,000 or so) in a location where it could serve the areas between towns, there are many areas where a tower with a ten mile radius would serve only a low four-digit number of households). Many of these areas do not even have basic cellular phone service today from any carrier.
Given that probably 90% of those four-digits worth of people live in a town (and thus would likely already be served by a wired Internet provider because it would be profitable to do so, subsidies or not), you're talking about almost half a grand per household served. And that's just for the initial tower construction costs. On top of that, you have to add the cost of a trunk line out to the middle of nowhere (at $30,000 per mile times 10+ miles to the nearest town), plus hundreds of dollars in customer premises equipment costs for each household (that many of those households could not realistically afford). Granted, $2,000 per customer is a far cry from $15,000, but it is still something that no sane person would invest in.
Even if you could miraculously crank up the radius up to 30 miles, it would barely be profitable, and short of insanely tall towers, that's about where the curvature of the earth itself will bite you in the you-know-what.
And the bigger problem is that all this proposed infrastructure is unlikely to pay for itself before the technology becomes obsolete.
In short, there is just no feasible way to solve the last-mile problem except for either A. the government forcing private enterprise to build out the wired infrastructure in exchange for the right to serve other, more profitable areas or B. the government building the infrastructure itself. Your viable choices are basically the system we have now or socialism. Take your pick.
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How about C. The government gets out of the fucking way in the form of granting some no-cost wireless licenses for bouncing the signals into remote locations? Or hey, granting some other companies the right to lay fiber? All the fiber coming in my county is owned by AT&T so my WISP bounces the signal in across four mountaintops to get it into my county. I'm sure some other party would love to bring more fiber in here, because they would be the only competition for AT&T and everyone and their mom wou
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Internet access is fast becoming as important as water, gas, electricity, roads etc and having the correct infrastructure is not something to be solely left to private enterprise. If we need a bit of socialism to solve it then lets have some socialism.
With the exception of electricity, those are all examples of infrastructure that follows the same model as broadband. Water and gas are only available in more densely populated areas, and roads have "less bandwidth" as they become more rural. In fact, although electricity is almost ubiquitous, there are still places that remain unserviced due to high deployment costs with no payback possibility.
Not sure how socialism ties in - at least where I am, water is a public service and gas is private.
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And a lot of rural homes are not on the grid for one or more of those other services too.
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Internet access is fast becoming as important as water, gas, electricity, roads etc
With the exception of electricity, those are all examples of infrastructure that follows the same model as broadband.
Water and gas can be delivered by road. I'm having gas delivered by road tomorrow. Electricity is carried on the very same poles as broadband and it is tree-networked as well. "Grid" is a lie.
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"The government gets out of the fucking way..." by having the government do something.
How many thoughts did you put into that before you spit it out?
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Yes and no. I've seen this play out with cable TV in my hometown. What happens is that the incumbent carrier has almost no ongoing costs (other than getting the service from upstream) because they already have the wire infrastructure. By contrast, the newcomer has to pay off the cost of their infrastructure. Thus, both companies quickly lowe
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If my sources are correct, about thirty grand per mile, including material and labor.
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"The government gets out of the fucking way..." by having the government do something.
Uh no. The government is doing something now, by preventing competition by threat of force. Thanks for playing, though.
How many thoughts did you put into that before you spit it out?
More thought, unfortunately, than your father gave to shooting you out.
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T
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Free markets are ones that respect private property. You gave examples of places where property is not respected.
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No, only the free market can break that stranglehold.
Funny, all my friends in Europe (and an awful lot of people in Asia) have much, much faster internet speeds than me, and their networks are far less "free market" than those in the U.S. Also, they pay a hell of a lot less than my $95 per month.
And while I agree that the U.S. has no free market to speak of, the result of a truly free market will ALWAYS be monopoly; the most successful company will buy the rest until only 1 is left.
Political move on Netflix's part? (Score:1)
Perhaps this is a political move on the part of Netflix. They can say that they're acting in good faith to alleviate the ISPs bandwidth concerns. If the ISPs keep balking, it could expose their motives more. What I mean is eventually it could be come indeniable that bandwidth isn't their concern and any unfair treatment of Netflix's traffic is just that, plain unfair. It could be good for all of us, backing the ISPs into a corner where they either have to admit defeat to Netflix in some sense (the lesse
So bottom line (Score:3, Funny)
Less buffering, more buffering? Will the Wii app still suck? Will their website still suck? Will all Android Netflix apps still app still suck?
And also (Score:1)
Will their available content still lack about 60-70 percent of what I want to watch?
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No, now that NetFlix has their own CDN, they will source whatever video you want. Anything that isn't natively in their library will be sourced from BitTorrent.
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I was really optimistic that the rise of things like Netflix, Hulu, etc. would make it easy for me to watch some foreign shows (legally), but alas, not so much
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My experience was just the opposite. I've used only Netflix for years now and never got cable. Tens of thousands of videos, compelling content. The financee is moving in so she wanted cable. I got Verizon's package with about 300 channels. Not a damn thing on that's worth watching...all pedestrian shit.
So whenever I read about people that can't find anything to watch on Netflix, but seem happy with dead common shows with commercials (and are paying more), I question the veracity of their statements.
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I seem to be perpetually disappointed with online distribution because I expect it to be a truly global place where things that
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A lot of that is licensing, because the contracts were never written with something like the Internet in mind. They would have to be rewritten, permission obtained, ect ect. It only tends to be worth it for popular things, new things, or things with pretty clean paperwork. Otherwise you just end up paying for lawyers yachts.
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I bet they'll still inexplicably insist that my e-mail address is invalid, no matter how many times I try confirming it again (given up at this point).
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any ideas as to why your email address is not "valid"?? flip me an email and maybe i can see whats wrong (not a netflix employee just want a puzzle).
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It cannot possibly be relevant. I can't imagine why that would happen, but I imagine it had something to do with the Wii not having enough horsepower to speak USB and run the iPlayer at the same time. But I've used the Wii with Netflix via WiFi and not had any more problems than you normally have, due to the fact that the client is shitty and has gotten shittier over time.
OMG! A caching server! (Score:1)
Stop the presses! No one has ever done a network caching server before.
Truly this is "news".
Not.
Re:OMG! A caching server! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most ISP's in the US (which is about the only place netflix works anyways) are the same companies that have been trying to destroy netflix to save their cable-TV interests.
I think you're half right. It seems like most people in most areas have the option of their cable TV provider or their phone company as an ISP. Obviously Comcast wants to get your money from their streaming services, and presumably other cable providers would rather you buy PPV movies from them instead of watching Netflix, but phone companies don't generally offer their own PPV service. If the phone company ISPs go for this in places where the cable TV companies have a significantly larger market share,
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but they're okay with these kind of things because they are trying to migrate all of their customers to fiber/VOIP so they can dismantle their copper networks as soon as possible
Not exactly... AT&T is pursuing fiber-to-the-node. That is, they run fiber to some neighborhood nodes, but everything still runs over copper to your house from that node. Last time I checked, Verizon wasn't aggressively building out their FIOS network anymore, just relying on new construction and regular maintenance to grow.
The real reason AT&T and Verizon are less concerned about Netflix is that they do not create content. Yes, they have TV service available and don't want to see it lost to Netflix
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You do realize their competitors are already hosting Akamai content servers ... which is who currently does this function for Netflix ... right?
So what you're saying is that netflix is going to be destroyed because their competitors are not going to do what they are already doing for them?
And when Netflix just continues to use Akamai in those data centers, how exactly does this destruction of Netflix come about?
You're comment would only qualify as Insightful if netflix didn't already have its content cached
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Just because the bigger ISPs want to see Netflix die a fiery death doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't want to host their CDN servers. The fact is, until that magical imaginary day when they do kill off Neflix, they're having to carry this traffic or host the CDN servers anyway.
Large corporations have no problem taking cost-cutting measures, even if said measures appear to be working opposite to the direction of some other part of the organism. Witness the companies that produce and distribute documentar
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Most ISP's in the US (which is about the only place netflix works anyways) are the same companies that have been trying to destroy netflix to save their cable-TV interests.
That is not true at all. The ISPs with the most users in the US are the same companies blah blah blah. Most ISPs by number are not Comcast, or AT&T, etc.
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AT&T and Verizon could live without cable TV because they don't create content. If Netflix continues growing and is successful creating exclusive content, I can easily see AT&T or Verizon partnering with them for a low-end, cable TV-ish service (YouTube could go this route, as well). That would give them a selling point against TimeWarner and Comcast who hate Netflix for the additional reason that it prevents commercials from paying for their content production units.
It will be very interesting to s
awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
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What, you don't want to watch every episode of Star Trek ever made?
What, again? I guess I could dig out my DVDs...
Netflix needs new content bad. I can't find shit to watch any more. There's loads of stuff I haven't watched, but sure enough, when I try some its ingredients are 1/2 c shit and 1 tbsp shit.
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You Yanks get Star Trek on your Netflix? You jammy bastards. The UK content just has Dr Who - the Sylvester McCoy Dr Who.
Actually, I have no idea what it has now, I watched everything that I wanted during a month's free trial, then cancelled. Since then, I've received an increasingly desperate succession of "Jesus Christ, please come back, there's even more ways to watch the exact same content!" emails.
I strongly suspect they may have shot their bolt way too early, with far too scattered a catalogue
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I have 'em on tape, I have 'em on DVD, I have 'em on my hard drive, and they run them every Saturday night on MeTV (free over the air). Why would I want to pay NetFlix for what I already have?
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Lillyhammer is a netflix exclusive and not that bad. And honestly "content" is pretty arbitrary considering the amount of network tv which is simply news, reality tv, and documentaries like behind the music, etc.
Content providers won't do it (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, The Cablecos and Telcos won't probably even bother. In an *ideal* world, they would do it to save bandwidth (and therefore not charge their costumers for that bandwidth), but I really doubt Videotron, Rogers, Bell and all the other money-hungry monopolistic providers will do it. It would eat into their Rape-the-customer-tv business. Besides, since we can get about third-world country 50GB/month of bandwidth here in Quebec, how many hours of Netflix does that give me?
Those big ISPs already have a bunch of cdn servers (Akaimai comes to mind), but they still count their usage towards your monthly cap, even if it doesn't cost them a penny on their peer links (since the content is already mostly cached).
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Do they? (Score:1)
Can I get a content caching server for my house?
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Major Source of Traffic (Score:1)
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2) Android (Linux) has had a functioning Netflix app for a while now.
3) If you mean desktop Linux, then yeah, I'd be all over that.
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A desktop Linux client is probably not going to happen until dm-verity gets in to mainline.
See this post [lwn.net], and then the LWN writeup [lwn.net] for details.
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I think it is: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.4#head-011d0bd1a20451b0e374283b36a71d8e8f5b7ae1 [kernelnewbies.org]
Re:Linux support? (Score:4, Informative)
Awesome!!! (Score:1)
I for one really look forward to taking advantage of NetFlix's offer. I run a small ISP serving five to six computers as well as several hardware appliances. All my servers as well as my customers are crammed into my house.
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Big CDNs don't make much money on Netflix - the margiins in media delivery suck and Netflix is notoriously cheap. CDNs might not mind losing some bad paying traffic so they can fill their networks with stuff they get more money for serving.
If the CDNs want to stop serving Netflix traffic so they are free to serve up other, more lucrative traffic, couldn't they already do that by charging Netflix more money, which would either give the CDN more revenue, or get Netflix off their network, so they win either way? Why would they want to see Netflix create an open source CDN appliance that Netflix (and others) can use to replace the CDNs?
Competirors Deploy It - No and Yes (Score:2)
When it comes to Netflix competitors, there are two main issues in the game:
1) Will they exempt Netflix content from their data caps - No. For as long as possible, providers with competing VoD services will continue to count the Netflix content against data caps while exempting their own offerings. This one is a no-brainer.
2) Will they provide the space, power, and cooling to host the boxes within their networks - Yes. Whatever their competing offerings, bandwidth still costs money. At the very least, p
FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
All these posts and no-one has mentioned it runs on FreeBSD?
Netflix's New Peering Appliance Uses FreeBSD [freebsd.org]
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Netflix is also at the front of the internet pack with IPv6 roll-out, and FreeBSD plays an essential part of that. We've been working hard on stabilizing the FreeBSD IPv6 stack for production-level traffic
But but but.......BSDL gives no incentive to give back!
as long as they are paying for BEER (Score:2)
me i don't care HOW they are doing it (as long as they don't NDA wrap the results) as long as it gets done (and they cut some sort of deal with the coder(s))
What about content? (Score:2)
On the technical side, why do we still have a queue for streaming? It doesn't make sense since you can view anything instantly. They should allow sorting. They also need better human curated movie lists. I can't find anything worth watching any more. It's nothing but 1-2.5 star selections left for me. And most of t
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If they keep with the Queue concept, I'd like to see multiple queues. So I can set one up for shows my kids like to see and one for shows I like watching. This way, I don't need to scroll through Bob the Builder Live and Yo Gabba Gabba to find my shows.
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SHIT YES. Right after not being able to sort all lists by clicking on the headers like a good little website, not being able to have multiple instant queues is the thing that pisses me off the most. I want per-device queues!
Division of labor and specialization (Score:1)
Does anyone have an idea how the costs differ?
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BSD is dying trolls are dying too.