One advantage of being your own boss is that you can tell granny how to suck eggs without getting the sack. So at the risk of teaching an old dog old tricks, today's article is going to go back to basics and draw a picture of a baseline network.

Under normal circumstances we might just draw a cloud in place of the detail below because the detail, like the network itself, is only relevant when there are problems that need to be understood. Once those problems are solved, we can all go back to drawing clouds.

The time to examine those problems is now. This week, Ofcom launched its Next Generation Access (NGA) consultation which appears to run alongside the efforts of the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) activities and Stephen Timms (MP)'s efforts to convene a summit. Whether all these acronyms offer parallel efforts or something more in keeping with the market trend for convergence, we shall see.

While the focus is on the local loop and the peak capacity that can deliver, the situation is a lot more complex than simply opening the gates yet further.

Transition
We are in transition from dial up to "true broadband". In fact we may always be in transition because after true broadband we should probably expect the next next-generation lobby to be pushing for something that they might have to call "true true supersuperfast broadband, honest". Drawing lines in the sand though - at say 100Mbps - gives a target that helps us plan for the next stages in the evolution, but it is worthwhile noting that there will never be enough to satisfy the high end users.

We know that video streams are an elephant in the room, which some have estimated will account for 98% of internet traffic within two years. This is a serious problem so that means getting into more detail about the network and the factors that are creating the problems.


The first point to make is that for all the fuss about Fibre to the Home (FTTH), that is only one part of the jigsaw in delivering video to people's homes. The local loop is one of four major choke points on the access network side that need to be considered. Sitting alongside those access issues are considerations of how the internet routes packets and how and where those packets are stored.

In fact, for all the hype, it may be that FTTH is one of the least pressing of the issues that stand in the way of the internet's ability to deliver the larger and much more lumpy video traffic on the horizon. At some point, the last mile will again be the most significant bottleneck - as it was when all we had was dial up - but right now, how many people would be able to use a 100Mbps local loop if it magically turned up on their doorstep?

Would the architecture support it? Would there we enough capacity in the home and on the core network to use it? How many knock-on issues would we need to solve before we spend the money on fibre in the local loop? A chain is only as strong as its weakest link...

The Home Network (x, in the diagram above)
A good place to start: it is undoubtedly the most complex issue because of the anarchy that exists in this space. There is no control over end points and how they are attached to the network, or indeed which network they are attached to. Security? It is best not to ask - denial is a wonderful thing...

Consumers are truly left high and dry to build the wireless / ethernet / homeplug network for themselves. If they are really lucky, they can get a friend / son / daughter to do it for them.

This makes the introduction of new hardware and new services that would use the 100Mbps a significant challenge. The customer may not have a network, or it may be "a bit flaky" such that when they come home with shiny new CE equipment, they are disappointed (or worse) to find that it doesn't work. So they make a call to the ISP but after a long wait, they find that their "service" provider isn't there to help.

Do you phone a friend every time you want to install a new device in your home? How soon before your DIY network starts to creak and your friend's generosity starts to get seriously tested? If everyone suddenly had 100Mbps to the home today, very little of it would be usable because the capacity of the last yard is significantly below that. Before FTTH, we need a solution that simplifies the home network and extends management of that to a real "service provider".

The Local Loop (y)
No-one is happy with the current state of affairs. That is not to say that everyone agrees that access networks are too old and slow and are in dire need of an upgrade - LLU has yet to be fully exploited, so perhaps we should start getting the best out of that? There are two conflicting priorities that need to be managed: ultimate speed is one of them, but at least as important is ultimate reach.

Looking first at speed, there seems to be a clear assumption made by many that we need more than ADSL2+. This point is worth explaining because this is not about headline speeds: 24Mbps for all would be enough for a fair few years. But ADSL 2+, like ADSL 1 speeds degrade with distance, so only anything substantial can only be delivered in real time over relatively short distances.


This table is from the BSG report, Pipe Dreams. Links to articles covering that and other articles can be found on the Digital Divide section of this site.

In summary, only 30-40% of the population are close enough to their exchange to get 8Mbps or more on copper. You can get more on cable but cable also covers less than half the population, similarly concentrated into densely populated areas. For some therefore, there is a vibrant market and the local loop is no barrier at all. Certainly not one requiring life support from a quango or two.

The role of the quango should be to concern itself with the areas where the market does not have an answer. In the local loop, this includes a significant number where there are signs emerging that the market for connectivity beyond LLU will fail. This failure will occur because the market needs huge investments by Openreach to shorten the copper loops but for the monopoly it is hard to see any extra revenue to pay for the new investment.

So 60% of us might be stuck with the speed we have today - it doesn't matter whether we use ADSL1 or 2+, the result is the same because the line length is the problem, not the technology at the exchange. And because the copper replacement case is so weak, you might have to move to a new build estate to get fibre to your home...

BT IPStream and ADSL1 (1)
There are very clear signs here and now of market failure in the provision of basic broadband access. Fortunately this only impacts a very small minority who cannot get 512k or more - a rare enough occurrence that some even appear as "news" these days.

This market failure today is very small indeed, but there is the prospect of many more (perhaps 15-20% of the population) getting left behind in the rollout of LLU. Although there is no doubt that competition here has led to cheaper products for all, those price reductions came at the expense of the digitally divided for whom competition in the local loop is a double whammy.

Competition means that investment from all players, including BT, has focused on the denser locations where the business case is best. For most, that means higher speeds and lower prices but the money taken out of the value chain through price competition, is money that was once used to cross-subsidise services where the business case didn't make sense. For the minority on the other side of the divide, LLU enshrines a two tier system.

Two Tier Pricing
A two tier system means two tier pricing, but it is worthwhile understanding what that two tier system means. It does not mean people miss out on broadband: almost everyone can get affordable broadband connectivity if they want it - 99.x% have access to some form of broadband and prices are universally below £20.

Two tier pricing may mean that the basic product is available for free on LLU exchanges and for £10-£15 more on IPStream, but even that is not the problem. The problem of the two tier pricing system as it is evolving, is the impact that it is having on the affordability of broadband capacity once you have the basic connectivity.

This manifests itself as usage caps and fair use policies because broadband capacity (as distinct from broadband connectivity) is hundreds of times more expensive on IPStream than on LLU. For these consumers on the wrong side of the digital divide, competition in the market means that the cost of actually using the service is prohibitive.

Every action has an equal & opposite reaction
This two tier system is the direct product of "managed competition". IPStream's prices are maintained artificially high to allow room for competitors to build their own infrastructure at a cheaper rate than they can lease capacity from BT.

Solving the two tier pricing problem may distort the competition that has been so carefully created because it means BT selling IPStream at rates comparable to LLU. This would undoubtedly stop future LLU investments and throw into doubt the commercial viability of many existing deployments. It also requires that BT have an incentive to cut prices for the least profitable exchanges in an environment where there is no competitive pressure demanding that they do so.

There is a significant difference between now and 2004 when BT held back enabling the least profitable exchanges with ADSL1 because the promise of returns was non-existent. The difference is that now BT has to compete with LLU; in 2004 they were a monopoly and could cross-subsidise more effectively.

The key question that we need to be clear on is who are we trying to deliver fibre to? Is it the top x% where a little shove makes the business case work? Or are we going to let the market work on that while aligning regulation and politics to deal with the bottom y%?

Backhaul (z)
Backhaul is an issue that is best summarised quickly here. There are more details in a previous series of articles written by Keith McMahon and I a few months back.

Backhaul has been a severe inhibitor to the development of broadband in the UK for the past few years but it appears that BT have been quietly upgrading capacity of even some of the long tail of exchanges to fibre (I have heard anecdotes of exchanges on the 95th percentile being glassed up). This, combined with their new BNS product for LLU operators described by Keith in the above article means that we are much closer to removing capacity constraints in backhaul.

That is not to say that backhaul is universally cheap though, as the model is heavily distance dependent and profitability is reliant on customer density. The pricing scheme is built to deliver service to those with their own core networks close to the exchanges being unbundled. The model is designed to clearly benefit the decreasing number of larger players.

Backhaul competition exists but the BNS introduction certainly took the price floor down a few notches. Additionally, there is a subset of exchanges colocated with the core network itself but these have a much easier life because there, core networks are cheap and plentiful and the backhaul circuits are simply internal wiring.

Would backhaul survive an overnight upgrade of local loops to 100Mbps? For the vast majority of users, the answer would have to be yes but what would break would be the business model because backhaul pricing is based on today's usage and not what you would see with 100Mbps in the last mile.

Backhaul Pricing
This final point deserves explanation because the way that prices are set is a self fulfilling prophesy. In simple terms, there is a "budget" for backhaul - ISPs and even consumers buy as much as they can for that budget. They will expand their usage gradually to fill it and then throttle back use so that they fall within the budget, until the price falls and the cycle starts again.

Dropping prices means more capacity would be available within the budget, but it does not often lead to absolute gains in total revenue because people still spend the budget. Of course it is recurring revenue so you need to keep cutting prices to keep the business - most assets require between 3 (hardware), 5 (system) and 15 (infrastructure) years of use at a recurring fee to pay for itself.

The problem for those selling capacity is that when you drop the price, it takes time to recover the revenues you have given away in the reduction and even when you do, you often find yourself back to square 1 as the throttling caps the upside. So it makes most sense to hold tight and wait for someone else to make the first move.

This point is clearer working through an example... Say you have 100Mbps of used capacity at £5 per Mbps and are charging £10 per Mbps to your customers. Your total cost is £500, your revenue is £1,000. Say that you then upgrade that circuit to 1Gbps at £1.25 per Mbps (total cost £1,250).

At that point in time you are making a £250 loss - what do you do? If the market is saturated you face a problem because you somehow need to be able to get users to pay more than their budget (£1,000). Even if there is still some growth room from new users, do you hold on and sell slowly at £10 per Mbps? Cut the price by the same proportion as the cost to £2.50 per Mbps (total losses now £1,000 and a breakeven point of 5 times your existing sold capacity)? Or something in between? Does this change if I tell you that your competitor is selling at £4 per Mbps...? £3.95, perhaps?

The problem is that prices are increasingly lumpy with ever larger upgrade steps (100Mbps to 1Gbps is 10x as is the next step to 10Gbps). Such steps cause problems because available capacity increases far in excess of demand. Pricing on the basis of availability would leave the owner with pennies in comparison to pricing on the basis of usage, although the latter has the effect of stagnating growth.

Backhaul Competition
Extending the core networks to get increasing numbers of exchanges on-net is the only way to take the recurring cost off your books, if operators want to. Putting their own fibre into exchanges sounds attractive, but it is even more attractive to wait until someone else does and then needs to sell the new capacity. At that point the wholesale customer can start to drive the price down aggressively at the expense of the facilities-based carriers who undercut each other progressively downwards.

There is an incentive problem for operators who may be considering investing in their own backhaul builds. They are better off waiting for some other idiot to make the first move...

If competition is going to stretch into the provision of local loops, it must first address the much simpler issue of backhaul competition. It is simpler because it is a fraction of the cost, but the issues are the same: protection of existing assets, build cost, site access, asset sharing, equivalence, price fixing, price regulation, period of regulation, certainty, etc. Perhaps it is a safer place to experiment with various solutions?

Content Issues
In simple terms, hosting content on your own servers is cheapest, next comes content on peer networks that can be reached through internet exchange points while Transit is the most expensive.

Transit originated as a way to get access to US content, but more and more of the big US properties are now hosted on caches that can be reached through in country peering (from my ISP, you can get to google.com through LINX). Transit still plays a big part because it is the only way to reach everything else (youtube.com goes through transit). The difference between transit and peering is that you can't transit peer networks as a general rule.

Transit networks themselves host a lot of content but their value primarily lies in that you can go over one of these networks to reach something the other side. So instead of maintaining thousands of smaller circuits with everyone else, Transit takes care of that in one interface.

How would content hosting be impacted by 100Mbps in the last mile? It might be ugly for a while as the shock of an overnight upgrade kicks in, but as we are unlikely to wake up tomorrow and find the tooth fairy has given us all fibre, we have some time to consider the impact on the electrical grid.

Space is not a problem: in the late 1990s data centres the size of football pitches were constructed which are still being filled now. Network connections are not the problem as most are on multiple fibre rings.

Power on the other hand is a real concern, particularly given climate concerns and the ever increasing cost of energy. We really do not understand the power consumption increases driven by fibre to the home - this cannot be ignored as delivering new electrical capacity may be even more problematic than laying the fibre.

Bigger Lumps of Data
Video is not necessarily going to be the most popular internet application but it doesn't have to be to cause the predicted impact. It is not where people spend the most time that necessarily drives the traffic: a second of HD video is 65 times as much data as a second of high quality music. Put another way, 1 hour of video is 65 hours of music or 315,000 page views on google.com...

For video files of that size, there are storage implications, but storage capacity is far more advanced than network capacity so it becomes more a question of where do you keep it to minimise the distance travelled and subsequently the cost you incur. If you can control it there are suggestions of charges for premium delivery to help monetise the downstream access network assets.

Whoa! Network Neutrality alert - but looking at how this is being played out, there is a question whether the content applications will cooperate to allow the ISP to exert such control. P2P is an example of how content companies are trying to work their way over the top of ISP platforms.

P2P vs Client Server
The concern with video applications is understanding the direction the market will develop. Will it be the wild west all over again with P2P data everywhere (forcing much of traffic onto transit networks) or will the video market evolve to work with the networks (much of the content locally hosted). At stake is the bill that ISPs pay transit providers for global access.

The choice of application is as much political as it is technical. If P2P wins, it will be increasingly hard for ISPs to do anything about monetising the increasing volumes of content but it may deliver an inferior user experience - something the ISPs can comfort themselves with. ISPs would be much happier with client server as that is something their networks have been built around and something they can control the quality and cost of.

Fibre and 100Mbps access certainly plays into the P2P corner as it blows away one of the fundamental limits of P2P - upstream bandwidth. In a DSL environment there is only the capacity to create perhaps a 10th of the capacity there is the potential to consume. In a fibre environment, it can all be P2P.

I believe that we need to look at how and where the networks route P2P and move routing closer to the edge to reduce tromboning. This is because applications would perform much better and network demands may well be lower, even allowing for the additional Layer 3 technical and operational overhead. Geo-aware P2P might work for everybody, but that is a story I have written up before.

Busy Hour Planning
There is a huge difference between how computers are used on the internet and how TVs are used. Watching television is much more heavily concentrated: peak audience (of all channels) is around 2.8 times the average audience over a 24 hour period, whereas for web surfing this is nearer 2.1. P2P actually generated very good peak load efficiency because the ratios of download applications that use P2P is around 1.4.

What on earth does this mean...? In simple terms, you need to provide 33% more capacity for watching TV as you would for viewing the same volume of data on the web because you have to build for the peak unless you want congestion on the network. Furthermore, congestion for streamed services like TV is far more serious than for web access (where building to the 95th percentitle was commonplace).


The chart shows how the usage of various applications varies and where the peak loads are on the respective networks. There is no weighting for file size - the area under each line has been rebased to 1,000 units. The aim is merely to show the peak to mean traffic profile of video is significantly higher than for web and P2P.

This reiterates the point above that for the same volume of data, you need more network for video than you do for other internet applications.

Which makes a situation which is already very bad, even worse - the capacity that we actually use today is only a fraction of what is available on existing local loops. Average usage of around 5GB per month on a 2Mbps circuit uses 0.8% of the connection's maximum capacity. There are over 8 Exabytes (8,912 Petabytes) per month of unused capacity on existing networks.

A 2Mbps link is enough capacity to deliver 146 hours of 1080p programming per month - the average household watches just over 100 hours per month. What we have today could deliver what we need tomorrow.

It highlights the inefficient use of the total available resource... The problem is "on-demand".

Conclusion
Video is the only application that looks remotely like driving demand for fibre. Assuming for today that we need to move video over from its existing broadcast platform - a case worth exploring in detail in another thread - it is clear that there are a number of key areas where we are not ready for fibre to the home.

We do not have the ability to deliver service because of networking issues in the home and commercial models in backhaul and hosting are going to have to change in light of the new traffic demand. But these are functions of evolution that will follow the technical capability as it grows.

Where there are serious questions to be asked are in the supply of power for the next generation capabilities and in the efficient use of the resource that is in place today. Every routing hop is another drop of oil gone forever and do we need to build nuclear power stations next to data centres to support demand there?

It is also clear to me that we are not using what we have in place today. Perhaps we should stop to think about that too before ploughing huge sums into delivering yet more peak capacity?

The removal of the bottleneck in the backhaul means that it is only the commercial model preventing full-time wirespeed usage of connections. For 70%, this is 2Mbps plus. Even if you need 10Mbps for the video itself, technology is evolving that predicts what a user might want "on-demand" and pre-loads it for viewing at 10Mbps.

This offers the network provider a way of maximising resource usage. If you can fill the unused capacity on the network today instead of pushing the headline speed, you don't need the expensive infrastructure upgrades.

There are clearly areas where there is a vibrant market for connectivity because of recent regulatory efforts to encourage competition. But this risks leaving a subset of the population behind with access speeds below what might be necessary - 30% cannot get 2Mbps. This is the area where lobbying and regulation should concern itself, not with the drive to 100Mbps.

Labels: BT, digital divide, FTTH, next generation networks, Ofcom, timeshift TV, video on demand

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Labels: Arootz, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, Joost, Veoh, video on demand

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Of course, any conclusions now are based on the current beta so if you are looking back on this article in a year's time, don't be surprised to find that what I say is now horribly out of date.

The BBC's service is very limited. It is riddled with compromises which detract from the end result and it's Kontiki P2P delivery is both a source of inefficiency and controversy.

And yet it is a start. A walk of a thousand miles and all that, but by taking the leap and putting the bulk of its programming on the internet, the BBC has opened a range of opportunities for the development of the service.

Kontiki's P2P is really not very good. It was very disorganised in comparison to Joost, which makes iPlayer and 4oD downloads slow to start and traces look a bit like kids bickering in the playground. I will be keeping an eye on peer hit ratios and will report back periodically on those as it is too early to draw firm conclusions on the amount of traffic that the BBC is offloading onto peers. But for now, talk is of underhand tactics.

Underhand? Yes - absolutely. My iPlayer is closed in the taskbar and yet kservice.exe is still running according to my task manager (Ctr+Alt+Del, Processes). Does it matter? Not to me as I don't pay for my upload but ever since I installed and tested 4oD I have experienced a significant increase in used upload capacity. If I was a cable customer, the extra bandwidth used on the coax might degrade everything for me and for my neighbours.

I deliberately slotted the Arootz article in the middle of this iPlayer articles because in that concept you can see how the BBC may be able to do it differently - multicasting to storage. If the BBC are committed to Kontiki, then they all have their work cut out.

As a user application, the iPlayer is inferior even to its 4oD stablemate because of the strange disconnection between where you select the programme - the web - and the application you actually view it on - the iPlayer itself.

It is all very different from Joost, Babelgum, VeohTV or YouTube. Those services are for live entertainment. The iPlayer is not - it is a catchup download service where you have to wait to watch what you want. The lack of progressive streaming is a big shortfall.

The addition of progressive streaming would make the service feel a lot more like TV. Furthermore, it would open the door to further development of the client software onto set top boxes, freeing the service of the chains that currently attach it to the PC.

I am not saying that the BBC is wrong to offer catchup downloads. It is a part of the product set that they want to end up with. Perhaps it is the low hanging fruit, but the final solution also needs to replicate and add value to the core broadcast model. Here too, there is work to be done.

Catchup Downloads has a number of avenues for development too. The capability will be very important in mobile TV where the cellular networks are simply too immature to offer anything like an acceptable experience for streamed services. Here, latent demand for mobile TV can be met by bridging the mobile handset and the broadband network, sideloading the media onto the device while the user sleeps. The iPlayer's current design provides this as a further development option, if nothing else.

But all is not lost - and that's why I issued the word of caution in the opening paragraph. As a service to me as a license fee payer, it is very good simply because it's got BBC programmes on it and not Channel 4s, Joost's, Babelgum's or Veoh's. It's attractiveness is directly proportional to the BARB figures which show the BBCs average viewing (for June) at 7 hours 24 mins against Channel 4's 2 hours 15 minutes.

In my service review, I wondered whether content was really king, and I think on reflection it is. What I think I've learned is that the application and the distribution network play a vital role in the shadows, they are the king-makers...

The BBCs royal aspirations are still alive and well after this release, but they really need to think about the people they are surrounding themselves with and whether they can get to where they want to be with the baggage they are carrying. I'm not just referring to Kontiki, the BBC is also weighed down by beaurocracy and that too is severely limiting the service.

If the BBC is serious about IP as a distribution technology for TV, and I believe they are, they need to evolve to a point where they simultaneously broadcast and offer up for time-limited storage their entire portfolio of programming. Quite what value they are creating by doing so is an interesting question given their unique commercial status - for competitors, the benefit is targeted adverts - but what does the iPlayer add economically? Something for another day perhaps...

Labels: 4oD, catch-up TV, iPlayer, Joost, Kontiki, P2P, video on demand

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Sometimes, you see something so elegant and simple, you wonder why no-one thought of it before. An old colleague and regular visitor to this blog contacted me the other day to advise me to check out Arootz - and I'm very pleased he did.

A Relative Unknown
I wish I could claim an exclusive, but I can't. They have been in BusinessWeek & the Jerusalem Post already but it appears that the point was lost on most people. There are only 53 blog entries on the company, the vast majority seeming to repeat BusinessWeek verbatim while most of the rest focusing on the fact that the company raised some cash recently.

One article I found does add some value, commenting on the BusinessWeek piece rather than just repeating it - more questions than answers, concluded Businessofvideo.com - and I agree with that part at least, but perhaps Mr Rayburn had a lot on that day because he didn't actually ask the questions. I have asked the questions - I contacted Arootz and their CEO replied with a significant amount of detail - and having looked into it, I have to disagree with the negative thrust of what Dan says.

Old Technology, New Ideas
It is true that multicast has been around for ten years or more. I know, I was at UUNET 10 years ago when UUcast was being hyped and developed in parallel. As with most other attempts to use multicast, that product failed to find a market because in the end, all it was doing was replacing broadcast and as we all know, if something isn't broken...

Multicast has again come back into people's thinking recently as IPTV services have been rolled out using the technology for the linear (live viewing) portion of what they offer. The problem there remains that multicast has not catered for timeshift behaviour. If you want on-demand, IPTV has to unicast and that means that you use a whole stream all to yourself.

I was discussing this problem with an eminent industry architect back in April at the ISP Forum event - his suggestion was staggercast, which effectively means a multicast stream of a programme being distributed every N minutes, much like Sky's multistart service for prime time movies. It was a definite improvement on multicast / unicast combinations already in use, but doesn't really tick that on-demand box.

Businessofvideo.com is also correct in highlighting that personal storage has also been around for ever. Quite right, it has, but what Arootz has done is combine this with multicast so that the network sees one stream and yet everyone gets a copy that they can watch what they want on demand. It's a mashup of two very well understood technologies and that is the simplicity that I refer to in my opening statement.

The Solution in a Nutshell
In summary, there are 3 elements - Distribution Servers where the content owner injects content, a Multicast enabled network and a set of user Multicast-2-Storage (M2S) agents sitting on PCs or STBs. Arootz sells this CDN as a managed service to content owners and works with the ISPs to make sure that multicast is turned on over the network. I'll come back to the web of relationships later in the article, but I will focus first on the service piece.

Targetted Adverts
My initial reaction was: ok, sounds good they've dealt with on demand but if you are multicasting, you miss the personalisation capability that must be at the centre of IPTV to make it a step beyond broadcast. Erm no, they've thought of that.

"The ads are delivered to storage ... based on the advertising targeted parameters, the decision which ad to show is targeted individually (based on a doubleclick server somewhere) and then the ad is inserted in real time into the video stream but since it comes from storage, it is fast, high quality and real time." Arootz's CEO Noam Bardin.

That's clever - the media and the ads are delivered separately and reassembled to create the final, personalised media file...

Navigating Uncharted Waters
What about navigation and finding what you want among the wealth of possibilities?

"We allow users to subscribe to RSS like feeds from a variety of sources ... We provide interfaces for preference engines to assist in selection of content such as 'the highest rated channel based on yesterdays actual viewership' or 'all content with the word Shark somewhere'" (Shark is of course an example of something you might be interested in.)

Hmm, I like that too. This is the elegance - mashing up social networking, RSS and an EPG into something that can cope with the huge volumes of content...

Huge Volumes of Content
Arootz estimates that the average user consumes 125GB of content per month. Obviously it depends on resolutions: it might be a fair bit less than that for standard definition TV, but if we were talking about 1080p, we could be looking at four times that figure. Is 500GB a lot of data? I think that depends on whether you are a unicast network or a hard-drive.

Terabyte drives are the basis for Arootz's business model and that starts to explain why you have not seen this model previously. Storage has always been far too expensive to make plans like this work but Arootz reckons that by 2010, you will be seeing cost effective drives offering 5 Terabytes... At this point, the limitation is back on the network.

Multicast takes care of the core network capacity issue because as with caching models I have discussed previously, each media file need only be sent once to each exchange and not once per user as with unicast delivery. This saves many thousands of identical 2Mbps plus streams and brings us back and the point where the bottleneck is again the physical speed of the local loop.

Use Case Example
While Arootz claims that its service only uses off-peak capacity, this is a configuration option that can easily be changed. The idea is that you watch live TV via the live multicast feed. If you are not watching (or are watching and have some spare network capacity), other programmes are sent down to you and stored on your machine. You pull these up on demand.

Of course you can't download the entire programme catalogue. Lets say there's 10 channels that make up your regular viewing, you can't even download everything on each of those unless you have a very very very fast connection. Choosing which programme to download (because you might want to watch it) is the job of the M2S AI agent.

The question then becomes whether the AI is good enough to make sure that the file you want is already on your hard drive when you come to watch it. Backing that up, there's the fall-back unicast option in the event that you are feeling a bit wacky today. It looks like it might hold together.

You might even find that the model allows you to escape some of the shackles of the local loop speed as it allows you to watch delayed feeds at 720p (6.4Mbps) even though your line may only just be good enough for 480p (2.5Mbps). A 2.5Mbps connection maxed out enables you to receive something like 800GB per month. For 720p content you need the AI to give you a 40% hit rate (you watch 25 hours a week, it downloads 65 hours that you "might" be interested in).

So Far, So Good
Arootz links multicast with storage and adds personalised RSS subscription with targeted advertising. Sounds good so far doesn't it? The software assets they have are clearly well thought out and fill a growing need. But what about the issues?

The weakness of the Arootz model is that it requires each link in the chain to be working in harmony. The content distributor must plant the content on the CDN, the ISP needs to multicast the channels and the PC or STB hardware requires the M2S software to take advantage of the storage and run the channel selection process.

Conflicts in the Supply Chain
These three parties are not exactly in cahoots. The interests of content and network are juxtaposed and that led to the Network Neutrality issues of 2006. Sitting uncomfortably with a foot in each camp are the hardware companies. Only Sky, with assets in each area following their acquisition of Amstrad last week, seem remotely aware of the need to align the interests of the players in the supply chain.

Although Arootz has an elegant solution to the video unicast problem, they need all elements in the chain to see it and play along to make it work. Without any one element, it breaks down. If they work together, everyone wins. So who is pulling it through so that the vision becomes a reality? As with other efforts to bridge these gaps, is it a question of chicken or egg?

"Look at it differently – if you believe (and I do) that most of video is going to be consumed off IP networks then there is a scaling problem with the current technologies. This scaling is quality, cost and technical. The main bottleneck is the network and our solution is the only cost effective way for this to happen. It may not be us but it will be multicast based. Just like internet advertising was dead in 2001, premium content would never go online in 2005 – Multicast will have to rebound because unicast cannot scale to deliver the cost/quality we expect." Noam Bardin again.

I agree with everything he says there, but it doesn't really answer the question. What is the incentive for each party to play ball? I think the answer is actually much more simple.

Cash. Cold, Hard Cash.
The commercial model is that content owners pay Arootz either as a straight arrangement or as an advertising revenue share. Simple enough so far, but in parallel, they are selling to ISPs.

"Our offer to them is 'let us accelerate your content on your network such as VOD, Internet TV and other components'. We will then wholesale the access to 3rd party content owners and provide them with a revenue share back so that they get more content distributed on their networks, more efficient distribution (less load), they get a slice of the action and thus are part of the value chain, unlike P2P where they carry the cost but are not part of the upside."

Aha! Someone is taking the bull by the horns and putting in place a way to route the money so that the networks open up and get paid for carrying content. It would be easy to think that the netcos should be happy with cost savings, and try and keep the distribution fees to themselves, but this statement above all the others shows that Arootz is pragmatic and understands that a virtuous circle needs to start somewhere. And the hardware?

"It can be embedded in software or hardware, it provides distribution and targeted advertising capabilities" and "we are not the brand"

Where Next?
As with every small company, there are a million things that can go wrong as larger and better funded alternatives try and achieve the same thing. That said, the technology that Arootz has and the pragmatic approach shown by their commercial model is an excellent starting point.

Channels to markets (they are in many) still threaten to derail the company as putting together the video supply chain involves dealing with some very heavy hitters. It may require the sponsorship of one of these big players to get the ball rolling, but this is a solution where without compromises, everyone wins. Worth keeping an eye on...

Labels: Arootz, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, ISP Products, next generation networks, targeted ads, timeshift TV, video on demand

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Labels: iPlayer, Joost, P2P, timeshift TV, video on demand

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It took just under 12 hours to assign me a beta test account, but just before 7.30pm on Friday night last week, my iPlayer login details arrived. Being Friday night, I cracked open a beer and then sat down to watch Top Gear - on my computer.

The Experience - would I do it again?
It was not very sociable... there was nowhere for my wife to sit because I was using the desktop. Perhaps if I'd been on the laptop in the lounge, it might have been different, but I can't see that sitting at the computer watching telly is going to be a regular Friday night thing in this house.

Maybe this is a feature of my demographics? If my children were older and wanted to watch their own thing, the iPlayer might offer an alternative to them having a TV in their room. Even that though doesn't feel right, because the service resolutely avoids any signs of the social networking that would attract the youth away from existing TV, SMS, MySpace & MMORPG activities.

Anyway Saturday morning, pressing on with my sample of 1 household, I asked my three year old son to be a crash test dummy while I took another look at the wireshark outputs. He thought it was an excellent idea because he got to watch "Beebies". He didn't care that it was on the computer - he didn't know any different - although he did at one stage ask me why my desk was messy. Perhaps he couldn't see over the piles of wireshark data printouts?

He was very patient for 5 minutes while the first programme loaded and then he sat there quite happily for 15 minutes watching Clifford, The Big Red Dog. Cuairt le Calum was next up which he knew meant Bob the Builder, but not because my three year old English boy reads Welsh, but because the EPG had a picture of Scoop on it. Finally I let him watch The Night Garden, a 40 minute show which downloaded in about 7 minutes in the background while he watched the other stuff.

I got some great Long Tail data samples while he got to watch Saturday morning TV and my wife had a lie in. We were all happy... Perhaps we will use the iPlayer when we go on holiday and can take the laptop, although I can't help thinking that with a few DVDs competing for his attention, the BBCs content is not going to be top of the list.

Using the iPlayer
It's not as easy to use as television and it doesn't use the features that the PC brings and the iPlayer does not offer video on demand either. Well, not what I would call on demand, anyway.

I'll come onto the technical bit in my next article, but you have to download a programme fully before you can start watching it because the application does not (yet) have a progressive streaming capability. This means you have a wait between choosing to view something and actually watching it - the zap time - anything from a few minutes to half an hour depending on the length of programme and your line speed.

This is where the iPlayer is clearly inferior to Joost, Babelgum and Veoh as video delivery platforms. With each of those, after a short period of buffering lasting perhaps a few seconds, you get the video you demand. With the iPlayer, the wait is a serious issue as you get no instant gratification.

Once the file was received, it's a simple click in the library to start watching the programme. I found the picture quality to be ok and comparable with Joost and Veoh. In my unscientific rankings that would make it better than Babelgum, but not as clear as Channel4 On Demand.

There are plenty of other blogs describing the service, so rather than repeat all that, here are a few links. Tech reckon it fills the need it is intended for, BBC News said that the iPlayer had received a cautious welcome and then went on to list some on the complaints from the user forums. I suppose you can't expect them to say that a lot of people found it somewhat lacking, although The Beta Test Blog said they were impressed.

My verdict on the service? Yes, I would use it again, it's just that I'm not sure when.

The next piece will look at the bandwidth usage of the application, files sizes, encoding rates and peer to peer analysis results.

Labels: iPlayer, video on demand

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It's not even a month since the last i launch, but tomorrow sees the launch of another service that could disrupt its industry to an even greater degree than Apple promises to do with mobile telecoms. This time though, thankfully, we won't have to pay the homeless to wait in line for us to get hold of it.

The BBC launches the iPlayer tomorrow, but unlike the iPhone launch where all you could find was praise and hype, the BBC faces nothing but criticism, doomsday scenarios and even calls for a ban on the eve of it's big announcement. No wonder the folks behind it have decided to find pastures new.

The problem is that the BBC is publicly funded. It gets its money from everyone in the UK with a TV set because we all need a license to own a TV. The BBC's license revenue comes in exchange for a responsibility to deliver a universal service, free of advertising to anyone who pays the license fee. Foreign readers may find this curiously eccentric in the 21st Century, but the BBC is a national institution and we are British so that's the kind of thing we do.

This is where the problems lie. The license fee was designed at a time when the BBC was broadcasting: it had no competition in 1922 when the license was introduced to cover radio. The TV + Radio license was introduced in 1946. The Sky empire was still just a twinkle in the eye of James Murdoch's grandfather at that time.

The company (if you can call it that) is now operating in a very different world, but for many reasons (most of them sentimental), the BBC is still funded this way. As a result, it competes with other TV channels (and web sites) on an unequal footing because their funding model does not expose them to market forces.

Because the BBC is publicly funded, it has been free of the commercial pressures that competitors face on a daily basis. Has this given it an unfair advantage...? How many R&D departments would be given 4 years and £3m to deliver a project? Surely, anyone else in the same position would have lost the faith of shareholders well before now and management would be history. The BBC's unique position has shielded the iPlayer and given it breathing space in which to develop the service.

On the other hand though, how many R&D departments would face an Ofcom Market Impact Assessment, a Public Value Assessment, a full review by the BBC Trust and scrutiny by parliament before it could launch? The kerfuffle about the lack of service on Macs and Vista - there is a petition with 11,000 signatures with Downing Street asking the PM to ban it - is frankly pathetic. Do people really expect the BBC to be able to launch the service working 100% and available to everyone on day 1 with no testing?!?

Anyone who has ever been involved in product management will know that this is a recipe for disaster. The BBC cannot eat the elephant in one bite, but because of its funding model it will be forced (they might say "easily persuaded") to deal with standards issues like no other entity. The elephant will be consumed.

The Mac and Vista options might be addressed by making the content available through other media players as long DRM issues can be resolved. I suggested in my LUI Part 6 piece, where we described a prototype of the future of IPTV, these players are likely to include the likes of Joost. Because of its universal service obligation, the BBC is not in a position to say no.

The BBC's obligation extends beyond the internet however. For those without a PC, the BBC is investigating Virgin Media's on demand platform. This still leaves a chunk of people with no access to the service because of technology constraints on the user's side (no PC, no cable, no broadband).

Even though Freeview does not offer the bandwidth, the BBC is sure to get embroiled in how to serve these users, where other competitors would simply write off the niche as too expensive to serve. This is the flip side to the breathing space they have had to develop the service.

We already have video on demand from Channel4, an evolving service from Sky and a promised launch of a service from ITV that looks spookily like that promised by the BBC. So what's the big deal with the BBC's launch tomorrow? I've said it could disrupt its industry to a greater degree that the iPhone, so I had better explain myself...

Driver for IPTV Adoption
Ofcom's MIA states that by 2011, the iPlayer is likely to account for 3% of TV viewing hours, which doesn't sound like a lot. This is in fact about 45 mins per household per week, assuming total viewing remains as today at around 25 hours per week.

But, as with Freeview, the BBC gives this new(ish) technology the credibility to go mass market very quickly. There will undoubtedly be a knock on effect on all other broadband television services because there may not be a more trusted organisation anywhere in the world than the BBC. If IPTV is good enough for the BBC, it's good enough for me...

Looking closer at the Ofcom projections: 3% of total viewing is 9% of the BBC's current viewing. It would be reasonable to suggest that competitors services might grow in line with the BBCs. This would mean every household in the UK watching on average 2 hours and 23 minutes a week of IPTV by 2011. Over 3 billion hours a year...

Bandwidth
The MIA also says "The costs of the broadband capacity required to support the services could in aggregate be between £399 million and £831 million over the next 5 years." Once the capacity is there "the additional capacity would also be available for use by a wide range of other services, including commercial on-demand services, [so] it would not necessarily be appropriate to attribute the associated costs to the BBC services in isolation."

Ofcom's model says that the average capacity increase from the iPlayer will be 3GB per user per month by 2011.

Assuming that other broadcasters follow the same adoption curve, you are looking at almost exactly 9.5GB extra per user per month to serve the 9% of viewing hours at standard definition. This will add around 46kbps per user to an ISPs peak traffic load (approximately doubling what they have today). This is low, because I am using data that shows that early iPlayer alpha trial users had web-surfing-like peak to mean traffic profiles.

TV usage profiles tend to be much more peaky than web surfing traffic. Where you might get a peak to mean ratio on web traffic around 1.6, on TV viewing profiles, this looks more like 2.8. Cutting a long story short, this would push the traffic impact of the iPlayer from 46kbps per user up to around 81kbps additional traffic (easily tripling today's usage, from just one application).

Reverse engineering Ofcom's 3GB per user per month figure from the 3% penetration rate shows that they assume a 2Mbps encoding profile in their models. This suggests that high definition is not being taken into account.

If the BBC were to deliver at 1080p instead (as ABC.com in the US have announced they will), you might want to multiply the total capacity requirement by 5. With all content (ITV, Sky etc) as HD, the 9.5GB might be 45GB extra for every house connected to the broadband network. This would push the incremental peak load per user up by between 220kbps and 385kbps depending on peak to mean profile.

Money
Where there is demand, there is money, right...?

Actually, no. This is the other major problem with the BBC, the license fee and the universal service requirements. The BBC's iPlayer will not generate money from adverts (the BBC does not do ads), from subscription (the license fee already covers the service) and any other creative sources of income (including abroad), are likely to be relatively trivial.

This is not an issue for the BBC because the content is paid for already (its a catch up service of stuff already produced for broadcast). The service creation costs have been kept under control at £3m and rather than having to pay a big hosting bill, Kontiki's P2P client is being used, theoretically relieving the BBC of the burden of distribution costs.

The big losers are the networks who have to carry all this extra traffic and have no way of monetising it. This is again a BBC-specific problem because with other commercial broadcasters, the ISP is in a position to do an ad-revenue share agreement based on the unique element that the ISP can provide - the postcode. (We are going to come back to this point and the revenue opportunity from commercial broadcasters other than the BBC in LUI Part 10 early next week.)

The use of P2P actually makes the problem much bigger for the ISP. Historically, the BBC's web traffic, although significant, has been manageable via direct peering relationships between the ISPs and the BBC. Replacing this with P2P looks (to me at least) like a two fingered salute to the businesses that have to transport the BBCs product.

Summary
Even using the lowest results in the analysis, the iPlayer promises to double the traffic on the UK internet between now and 2011. On top of that the iPlayer opens the door to other broadcasters, which could mean that instead of doubling the volume of traffic, the iPlayer launch could drive an increase by tenfold or more.

I'm going to be watching the iPlayer's use of bandwidth very closely over the coming months. As I have done with Joost, Babelgum and 4oD, I will be running traffic source analysis and looking at where the Kontiki client gets its traffic from. Channel 4 also uses Kontiki, but using their service, I found that the scarcity of peers meant that much of the traffic was client server from the seed caches instead of actually using P2P.

I will be keenly examining the peer hit rates as that will determine the BBCs costbase. I will also be looking at where these peers are and whether BBC/Kontiki keeps traffic within the service provider's network or whether (like other P2P I have tested), in-country traffic source management is random. I will be publishing the findings here at periodic intervals.

If I can get the client from the website, the first set of data will be published here by lunchtime tomorrow...

UPDATE: no client = no data = no update. Sorry folks...

I got to the site by 7.40am, regsitered but have yet to receive the invite. I wouldn't say that the message board is on fire yet (10 ir so people grumbling about the same thing), but there are people who stayed up until midnight to register who are in the same boat.

They let Mashable in though, so if you are looking for a sneak peak that's the place to go. If you want a different perspective on possible adoption rates, I also found this.

IWR were able to run an initial test and reported that a 30 minute programme was 108MB, which suggests an encoding rate of 480kbps. It is not known what the download speed was, which may be different from the encoding rate to allow for buffering. The picture defaulted to 400 x 200 screen size, which sounds small.

More on this when I get my prized invite...

Labels: 4oD, Babelgum, catch-up TV, iPlayer, IPTV advertising, Joost, Ofcom, timeshift TV, video on demand

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This is part 6 in the Leeds Unbundled ISP (LUI) series that Keith McMahon and I are producing. The aim is to deliver a view on the commercial prospects of a hypothetical ISP, serving a niche community (Leeds in our example).

Before we can properly present the numbers though, we need to describe what those numbers are modelling. We have already looked at backhaul, staffing and our short and medium term product set. Today we look at the biggest variable in the future of our made up ISP: video.

IPTV is better for viewers than broadcast because it is truly on-demand. It gives viewers timeshift capabilities for BBC, ITV, C4, Five and Sky so that they can watch what they want on TV around the rest of their lives. So what is the variable?

While we are confident that video services like YouTube will continue to grow, we are not sure whether mainstream TV will successfully move online because of economic, marketing and technology challenges. IPTV is competing with established digital platforms (satellite, cable and freeview) that already penetrate 18m homes (more than have broadband). Getting mainstream TV online means replacing these distribution networks with the internet.

Consider the scale difference between the two extremes of service adoption: YouTube consumption is a few minutes at a time, a few times a week. TV is 25 hours per household per week. YouTube is currently 200kbps, IPTV as a vehicle of HD means 10Mbps.

There is very little that LUI can do to make any money from YouTube, but conversely, once we have our gigabit backhaul links in place, we are not too concerned about the cost of carrying its traffic. If they cranked up the resolution to the levels used by Veoh (700kbps), we might be a bit more concerned but as it stands, we are happy enough to carry the traffic.

What cannot be allowed to happen is for us to end up in a situation where we are a simple transport network for everyone else's broadcast-replacement services. Our commercial model, and that of every other ISP in the world, is based on carrying relatively small files (peak traffic over total users equals around 35kbps). TV viewing moving over to the internet and adopting HD resolutions will make this closer to 5.5Mbps (159 x the current dimensioning).

This needs to be paid for and the value is in the content: people buy music, video and TV. They don't buy bits and bytes. This means that we need payment for our bits and bytes bundled with the payment for the music, video and TV services. This means adopting a Fed-Ex model for superfast delivery of premium, newly released content and ad supported models for the rest.

Will this happen? Maybe, but only if the economics are right - we know that IPTV offers better functionality than broadcast because the internet uplink opens new doors for interactivity. With the public becoming disillusioned with telephone based interactivity on TV we think that the internet can rescue what had until recently been a popular genre of content.

Furthermore local loop speeds of 20M or so means HD at 1080p is practical and can be made available on demand. It's all technically possible but all these developments will only be attractive at a price point that is competitive with broadcast.

So where does that leave LUI?

Nowhere, right now at least. We just have a basic access service with some customers on CPS. Next up dev wise is the photo blog (due Q4 2007) and starting work on the softswitch (due 2008 perhaps). Enhancements to the photo blog and community stuff are mid 2008 launches.

We looked at buying in a wholesale IPTV service, even before we unbundled the access service. When Tiscali bought HomeChoice, we heard some suggestions that the HomeChoice platform would be wholesaled alongside Tiscali's LLU platform. While the attractions were obvious, the differential advantage was not, so we rejected that option.

More recently, we have looked at Iliad's platform and the service that Fastweb offers with a view to buying that in lock, stock and barrel. These are not currently deployed in the UK and although we could overcome the competitive issue to some degree, we just felt a little underwhelmed by the idea of taking something that had been done before.

LUI wants to do something a little differently and has to exploit our core concept: our localness. For LUI, IPTV has to be build around the community, but we also have to remember that it is still essentially a distribution network for mainstream TV that replaces the satellite dish, cable or freeview aerial in the home.

LUI's problem is that our customers can get all that from other operators, notably Sky & HomeChoice, so where we need to be different is in the EPG. We need to offer social networking in the EPG that exploits our localness and the social groupings within our customer base.

We are a network company and a small one at that, we need someone bigger to bring us the content. That means the content won't be exclusive so we have to add value to it another way. Hence the EPG and social network mashup.

That means things like the ability to recommend a programme to your circle of friends and comment on what you have seen, perhaps with an SMS gateway tacked on for alerts. When you turn on your EPG you see the linear TV option and the timeshift scroll back for the mainstream channels plus a Friends Recommend Channel.

We also have the Leeds Community Channel which will be developed before our IPTV service, but which needs evolve onto the TV when IPTV does arrive. The Community Channel is where local interest groupings (schools, community education, sports teams etc) can post virtual private videos to their members - much like the Iliad offer. All this is built on top of a core of content based on today's free local press.

We are already lobbying to force the publicly funded BBC content to be made available via public API so that anyone with a delivery solution can use it to deliver BBC content. The others are different because they are commercial entities, so why will ITV, C4, Five and Sky let us carry their stuff, sometimes in direct competition with their offerings?

Money. Pure and simple. They can get more from our subscribers if they deliver content via our network than they can via other means.

How? Because we know the customer's postcode and we can deliver that when we place the request for content. We also deliver the ip address of course, but they would get that anyway. With the postcode, they can then use Geo Mapping databases to paint a very good picture of who the consumer is, so they can use a) demographic and b) personalised advertising. They can't get this postcode without the ISP.

We could also consider sharing any special interest profiles that the user may create on our social network but this raises some ethical issues I suspect, not to mention the technical challenges.

But all of this needs to be pulled together: content, advertisers, client software, DRM and CDN. We are looking for one party to bring this to us. LUI's plan is to work with them and vice versa to prototype the future of IPTV.

The prototype is based on Joost, or Babelgum or Veoh (we haven't stitched it all together yet, it's just a plan). Something that runs on either an AppleTV-like STB or on the TV itself. Their job is to aggregate the content and provide us with an efficient distribution using P2P and local caching. They also handle all the advertising including the targeting and pay us a revenue share.

In order for this to work, Joost (or whoever our chosen partner is) must bring a deal with the major broadcasters. Joost does the deals with the content owners for us because they can and we can't.

Our BBC, ITV, C4, Five and Sky content comes through the deals that Joost has with them. Joost can pay better ad revenue than the producer can get by themselves from broadcast because we give them the postcode. As a result, they can target ads much more effectively. We get a rev share because we are adding value to their proposition.

Furthermore, we are solving one of Joost's problems - the EPG and social networking, which are currently lacking in their product - and we are leaving them to concentrate on their role as the IP TV operating system. We carry Joost's traffic and help them develop their intelligent localised P2P routing.

We provide the EPG (or at least our software partner behind the photo blog / community web stuff do that for us) and that has a two way API into Joost (or whoever). The EPG is our value add, our brand, our directory of content and the portal through which users can get to the array of services that we offer. Of course, they can go onto the open internet but with our gateway offering them RSS-based access to the world, we reckon that we can hold a fair proportion of the screen-time on our own services. Which is great for our ad revenues.

Of course this is all made up. LUI doesn't exist and there are holes in the plan and some very rough edges. With any luck though, this might give you a few ideas...

Part 7, back on Telebusillis is going to look at Hardware, which Keith will publish later this week!

Labels: Babelgum, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, ISP Products, Joost, LUI, next generation networks, timeshift TV, video on demand

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Back in April, when I was writing my original "Joost: analysis of a bandwidth hog" piece, I had no idea that the piece was going to make up 24% of my pageviews since then. It is quite possible that this had nothing to do with my writing and everything to do with the strategy secrets to be found in the link colmmac posted in his comment. Unfortunately, these secrets are now gone but you can read all about it here.

Whichever it was, it was clear that people were interested in how the application was behaving, so I updated the analysis in late May with my "Joost about on track" post that also looked at the wider strategic issues facing the company. My summary was that they were kitted up to play, but by no means certain of making the cut. They had (and still have) a lot of work to do on their EPG to improve what is a very static and "been there, done that" channel guide.

The content delivery network though was improving and this has clearly moved the company towards the concept of being "a high quality ad-supported secure cost-effective delivery platform" that works within networks rather than over the top. Their new CEO used to head Cisco's network equipment division, remember... Joost: the operating system for IPTV?

Now in mid-July, having run the analysis for a third time, it is clear that one thing that is working really well for them is the peer-to-peer network. Success here is measured in hard currency: the bill they pay their network providers (Level3 mainly, but also BT Infonet). What I am looking for in my analysis is the proportion of traffic that comes from peers versus the proportion that is served from these centralised locations.

In order to get my results, I am using Wireshark, which many readers will know as Ethereal. This allows me to see all the traffic on my LAN, and if I turn everything off except Joost, enables me to see what the application does when it is active.

What this shows is that for popular content at least, Joost has successfully offloaded the vast majority of traffic from its paid-for connections onto its free P2P network (free to Joost that is). In April's study 47% of bytes came from central servers, six weeks or so later on the 25th May I reported that this was at 18%. Results from 11th July show that this is now 6.7%

This popular content (the Fifth Gear Ferrari 430 Spider road test) is now well seeded, such that no one peer delivers more than 12% of the total file. There are some major sources: 6 peers between them give me 50% of what I am after and 14 peers account for 80%, but there is a long tail.


In total, there 99 IP addresses on 75 different networks in 33 countries delivering traffic to me.


From what I have seen, the network is now starting to prefer peers on this side of the Atlantic (possibly because there are just more of them now). Where in my May sample there was 39% coming from the US and Canada, this is now 4% in my July data. This is good news. Things are moving in the right direction.

So now that Joost's distribution capacity is seeded in Europe, expect to see this get more country specific to align with the network interconnection arrangements already in place. Serving Joost punters in the UK from other users in the UK means that ISPs costs are mitigated as they will likely avoid the most expensive routes - Transit.

But this is still only mitigation. The overall burden on the ISPs goes up with every Joost user that leaves their PC on even if the application minimised.

As I have mentioned before, Joost also uses the network when it is inactive (minimised), which I have questioned in the past. I don't know if this is new or if I missed it the first time, but the Terms and Conditions acceptance box now states clearly "I know that the Joost software will operate when minimised unless I fully exit the software".

Perhaps this is a necessary evil, but in a world where many people either have bandwidth limits or fair use policies set by their service providers, consuming someone's scarce resources for use by a complete stranger is still a big concern for me. This is where the house of cards could be vulnerable - you might give them a lift if you were going that way anyway, but would you let a stranger borrow your car when you are not using it (even if you were 100% sure you'd get it back)? Hmm...

Perhaps this won't be an issue. Certainly when I was sampling yesterday, I was surprised to find that the Joost application was not using my bandwidth when idle. Granted, this was yesterday morning around 11am so I can understand that demand from other users will be pretty low at that time - most people are at work of course and not watching Fifth Gear on Joost. I am certainly going to have to come back to this point and look again what is happening at peak hours.

I speculated in June that once the peers are well established, the file sizes can be cranked up to increase resolution and user experience. That time may well be approaching - perhaps when the service finally goes from the most well known Beta trial in history to being the real thing?

Having said that, to my untrained eye, the resolution already looks much better than it did in April. This might well be new codecs in the ever evolving software (the latest download is version 8 of version 0.10, so the guys there have clearly been busy). Whatever it is, the picture quality is now almost as good as standard definition TV. Not quite up there with Channel4's on Demand service (which uses a lot more bandwidth), but a lot better than Babelgum.

It does not look like this improvement has come by cranking up the bandwidth used by the application. My traces show that this is about where it was before, if anything the use may even be ever so slightly lower. The picture quality though is a lot better.

So that was popular content, what about the stuff that is buried in the Joost channel guide? Wow, do you have to work to find something watchable here? In fact I didn't watch it, I put it on, started Wireshark and went to make a cup of tea.

I chose the Community Channel because it seemed like the sort of thing that trendy Joost-heads would be most unlikely to be interested in. To be fair, the film was actually very well made, home made, but well made. It was about a couple of schools who decided to give their pupils a taste of the business world by letting them play Tycoon where they could design and develop a product for sale in their communities. Thankfully Peter Jones was nowhere to be seen.

So I was surpirsed when Wireshark revealed that this show about three very British schools, was coming largely from servers in the US. 68% of bytes came all the way across the Atlantic while almost all the rest was from the UK. The source networks? Level3 in both cases.

The aim of the experiment was to see how long tail content was distributed and here we have an answer. It makes me wonder (again) about the whole Long Tail thing. It is going to cost Joost an awful lot more to distribute this as it will be very hard to seed. They will be much better off if / when they get mainstream content on there that they can deliver as timeshifted linear TV.

My research has previously shown that on YouTube at least, the internet means that the richer get richer. The 20th most popular clip there had 18% of the views of the most popular, while the 20th most popular DVD rental generated 79% of the revenue of the no. 1 title. Humans like to follow the herd and social networking helps by showing the direction the herd is heading.

If it is far more expensive to distribute the unpopular stuff and demand for it is much lower (lower demand = lower prices), where's the business case? Time will tell, and I've been wrong before...

Labels: Joost, timeshift TV, video on demand

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Joost

There is really very little going on in the way of P2P on the Babelgum service. It is built in, but it needs the network to be seeded. The same was true of Joost when I took the above sample on 3rd April, although their peer hit ratios were better six weeks later when I went back to look at them again. I'll give Babelgum a chance here and reassess this point in a month or so.

In terms of content quality, there is more choice on Joost. Sometimes more is less and this might be a case here. The programming on Joost is very yoof - very hip. Just not very watchable unless you like burps, farts or loud music. The Babelgum archive has some interesting stuff that I have actually watched... Like the Turtle Treaty piece on how the inhabitants of remote islands revere, and yet end up eating, the turtles that they share their lives with. Not what I expected, but welcome nonetheless.

Another area in which Babelgum seems to have the edge is in the realisation that this is TV as well as Video, and that there is a difference between the two. There is clearly the broadcast angle built into Babelgum - look at the AP news channel for example.

The Babelgum interface is really clean and I think that also works better than Joost at the moment. I think maybe though the Joost one is more scalable somehow as the Babelgum GUI might restrict the number of channels you can track due to the amount of info on each channel that they carry.

There is also a different business approach. The Babelgum one is open, almost to a fault, describing the revenue share on ads up front for example. It seems like they are going to go straight for the second tier of no-name producers and give them an indie-platform. Joost are much more into the "household names" by the looks of things.

So which one wins? I would have to say that I prefer Babelgum, but that I think that Joost will win long term. The niche that Babelgum seems to inhabit with its programming and navigation is nice but that is an area that Joost can fix probably easier than anything else. Where Joost has the upper hand is in its impetus which is taking the company into the offices of the very biggest names in the industry. Joost is not really a service yet, it's a vision. It will either be successful breaking the status quo or it will be acquired to make sure that it does not.

Babelgum just does not seem like it can emerge (out of Italy) and break into the "not-invented-here" markets. Joost is making a big play for the US because it understands that the US is a thought leader and standards setter in the internet space. In the end, this is where I think both are heading - into the position as "the operating system" for internet video. Here they take on YouTube amongst others... Is there room for multiple O/Ss?

Labels: Babelgum, Joost, video on demand

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Joost is a hot topic. It deserves to be. There are many things about the service that aren't quite right, but underlying it all are three key ingredients for success: big-name backing, excellent PR and efficient, adaptable technology.

Of course they have issues. The project has spent less than a year in the public eye and there remain three other factors threatening the success of the venture: programming, devices and networks.

The programming is not right somehow - perhaps they need to consider adding "broadcast channels" because finding what you want from a static list seems to ensure the content gets stuck in time. The first time you go there, you find one or two things of interest, but when you go back you are left trawling somewhat. It makes the whole experience too predictable.

But, the backing is in place to fix these problems. The number of content producers is already impressive, even if their offering isn't. No-one is putting their best stuff up there yet - it's early days. Viacom own Dreamworks, who produce a large chunk of the most popular kids movies. If you have kids, what price an online archive of all Dreamworks films, on tap? Its not there, yet.

Before that happens, something needs to be done with the channel guide to give it a bit more life. It is surprising that there aren't more "social networking" buttons. If it were easy to rate content, you could be sure that there would be more turnover and better filtering of the good stuff. Make it less miss and miss.

This can all be done. A bit further down the line though, they are going to have to face up to the device question, which is to some degree, out of their hands. I don't know that Joost are betting on the PC being the dominant, always on device in the home, but if they are, then they may be swimming against the tide. Everything is a computer now, there are processors in everything. This will surely mean that specialisation wins over generalisation - TVs do video and HiFis do music. PCs do publishing. Multi-purpose devices are for mobile users who have a premium on weight.

But this is where the PR can help. Here, even the screw-ups are working for them. Colmmacc posted a link to a set of slides he had produced on the network architecture on my last post on that subject. I hope he didn't get into trouble for this because it turns out that hidden beneath the visible layer on the PDF was a whole host of info on Joost's 3 month strategy goals.

This leak, just serves to increase the buzz about potential partners and shows that the team knows what they are doing. An example is the combination of US Soccer and Real Madrid as launch partners, showing a clear appreciation of the David Beckham PR phenomenon that is about to hit the US. It has been suggested that this leak was a Machiavellian PR exercise, which is almost certainly not true, but it shows how highly regarded "The World's Hottest Start-up" is that people are willing to believe that this may be part of the plan.

I just hope that this doesn't cause the company to clam up, because a big part of what is making the PR work is the open approach of the team. Openness always makes you more vulnerable to leaks of "sensitive information", but it also allows you to get on with stuff and build partnerships. The reverse is also true - if you are afraid of giving the game away, you don't give partners enough to make them want to join you in your adventure.

The PR is the way that Joost can solve the device problem they face. Just as Skype became the must-have bolt on to cheap IP phones, it is quite possible that a Joost installation could become standard on the television itself, requiring just an ethernet or wireless uplink before it is ready to go. Of course, a set top box could do that job too in the interim period. At this point, the platform becomes a de-facto standard for online video distribution, with anyone and everyone as possible paying customers.

Joost: YouTube for Professionals.

I can't see Sky liking that very much, but it gives Virgin, the BBC, ITV, C4 and the other content owners and distributors a way around Sky's possible IPTV content / network monopoly.

Which brings me onto the network, which is growing on the back of version 0.10's For Friends offering. It seems that there is quite a bit more content added and a few tweaks here and there, but the programming remains as was. The main development is that there is a lot more advertising with discrete logo hyperlinks displayed throughout whatever you are watching.

The P2P hit rate that they seem to be getting is certainly improved over my earlier analysis, at least for the popular items. Level3 seems to be taking full responsibility now for the seed network, there is little or nothing now from the Infonet Luxembourg centre that there was a few weeks back.

On the "Most Popular" clip of dudes surfing in Hawaii, only 18% of the traffic came from Level3, and there was a broad distribution of 8 peers who between them delivered a further 74% of traffic. 66 other peers gave me the remaining 8% of bytes. When I did the same, while watching Rockie + Bullwinkle (not the most popular...), I found that there was only one peer hit, delivering 15% of bytes, but leaving 81% to the Level3 network. Only 4% of bytes came from the remaining 56 peers in that sample.

There is no crunch point yet, but if traffic does grow (still an if, given the programming issues), changes need to be made to the way in which Joost works with the networks to route the packets more efficiently. The huge amount of tromboning that currently takes place needs to be addressed by the networks as well as by Joost (this is a link to colmmacc's slides minus the "secrets").

Joost's card in this gambit is its efficient, adaptable technology. Used in the right way within a network, it offers an extremely powerful publishing platform offering the ISPs using it a potential differential advantage. That level of integration is very hard to do however (for the ISP more than for Joost, I suspect) for an ISP fighting a price war. Joost may have to wait a little before going down this road.

Alternatively, they could launch a guerrilla war against the networks. Of course they'll say that they won't, but it might not hurt the service providers to think that a possibility. Joost could entirely disintermediate the network from the video value chain.

But like I say, all this talk of global domination is a few years away, and it will not happen until Joost addresses the core programming and makes the service something you watch, rather than something you play with (as you do today). Toys get boring after a while.

Labels: IPTV advertising, Joost, next generation networks, video on demand

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Ten days ago, quite unexpectedly, my wife had a baby. Of course, I knew she was pregnant, but the little guy wasn't due until the end of May so we weren't ready - I'd managed to paint the ceiling of his room, but not the walls. He didn't have anywhere to sleep or any clean clothes to wear. It was all a bit chaotic, as I'm sure you can imagine.

All's well that ends well, but all this meant that I was unable to write anything last week as my job suddenly became Chief Entertainer for our two year old son. They say that it's easier the second time around and they are right - looking after a newborn is infinitely easier than looking after a two year old...

On Monday night this week I got a bit of time to myself. Not much, but between 8pm and 9pm I managed to catch a bit of telly. Fortunately for me, there was not one, but two programmes that I wanted to watch. Unfortunately for me, we don't have a Sky+ box and my old VHS recorder let me down badly when I tried to tape the Australian Grand Prix a few weeks back so I have consigned that to history. So I had to make a choice: did I want to watch Panorama's programme on Scientology or Dispatches' character assassination of our next Prime Minister, Gordon Brown?

Again, last night (Tuesday), I had an hour to myself. A precious hour. An hour I had worked hard for all day. But what was on? Nothing!

(Strictly speaking, that's not true as I have hundreds of channels, but there was nothing there to float my boat and I ended up watching Hugh Grant's truly dire American Dreamz on Sky's Comedy Movie Channel)

So one night I miss something I would like to watch and the next I'm forced to watch Hugh Grant pretending to be Simon Cowell because there's nothing else on.

"A sample of one", said an industry expert when I described my problem to them. "The best thing about television is that it is not interactive", and while I agree with them to a point, I can't help feeling that what I experienced last night (not for the first time on a Tuesday night by the way), would be enough to convince me to go for a genuine time-shifted / catch-up TV service. Given how precious my time is now, I would be willing to pay for it too - on a subscription basis, not pay-per-view as the last thing I want to do after reading The Gruffalo for an hour is to analyse whether watching X is worth £Y.

So why don't I get a PVR? Jolly good question that - maybe I should - but I can't help thinking that this just adds one more problem to my already busy life. A PVR requires planning and foresight which is something most people with kids are short of at 8pm. For sure, I would have been able to watch Lewis Hamilton's debut in Melbourne a couple of months back because I would have set the thing to record (as I tried to with the VHS), but you don't often get a programme like that, that you know you are going to miss and want to watch enough to get off your backside to do something about.

I am talking about that veg out time. That precious hour, when you really don't want to think "if only I'd set the PVR last night", when it would be so much easier just to go "back" through the programme guide and find something, anything, better than is on offer right now.

If you are the BBC, ITV or C4, making quality programmes, why do you want to restrict your audience to those that happen not to have anything better to do when your work is aired? Don't you think that more people would actually watch your stuff if they could do it on their own terms. Maybe they would watch less imported tosh and maybe Sky have more to lose than gain from on-demand?

Clearly, the BBC and C4 are with me on this. The iPlayer is horribly caught up in bureaucracy, which is a shame because the BBC have most to offer when it comes to quality programmes. C4's 4oD is available now, so as part of my research into this article, I have caught up on the half hour or so of the Dispatches programme that I missed when I switched over to Panorama on Monday.

The quality of the 4oD download was good. The file was 348 MB for 48 minutes of film, which is very slightly under 1 Megabit per Second. Interestingly, it was 48 minutes because the 1 hour broadcast had been stripped of the adverts - which I consider peculiar in the extreme. Surely, here is a great vehicle for ads to help pay for the service provision. Although, with the ability to fast-forward in the current media player, you might not expect people to watch them...

So I watched the re-run of Dispatches on my PC and as I worried about whether my country was going to end up with a control freak as its next leader, I also considered some research that I had seen from CacheLogic into online video watching habbits. Was I happy with watching TV on my PC? Yes, but it was "during my lunch break": I would not want to do this at 8pm during my precious hour of veg out time. I didn't last night... I watched Hugh Grant "acting" the twit instead.

The picture quality was equivalent to broadcast TV (and better than Joost, which runs at around 700kbps). You have to download the 4oD application which has an embedded Ioko Kontiki P2P client, which obviously aims to spread the distribution burden.

I checked my download with Wireshark (fka. Ethereal) and found that over 90% of the data was coming from Ioko's own network, indicating that the seed file had not been distributed sufficiently to allow P2P to have much impact on Ioko's (and C4's bandwidth costs). I'm sure they weren't helped by the fact that I turned off my 4oD client as soon as the download had finished in order to save my bandwidth cap. This all meant that someone on BT's Central Plus that had been receiving data from me, had to find somewhere else to get it from - probably back to Ioko...

It is also interesting to note why I wanted to watch Panorama. Like many other visitors to the BBC's web site I had been intrigued by John Sweeney's tirade at Tommy Davis (official BBC version). As a blogger with an emphasis on online video, I was further intrigued by the use of video by the BBC to promote their programme and the use of YouTube by the Church of Scientology to counter the position taken in the programme - Scientology getting its retaliation in first.

So whatever your views, whether or not you believe we are descended from aliens or not, you can now make your views known to the world and with a bit of time and effort (and £2,000 of electronic equipment). I have no doubt that there will be a lot of long term fallout from this very high profile example of an electronic propaganda war.

On demand allows me to fill my precious hour with something I want. But it's not just about me, it's also a vehicle for advertisers who want to reach me. Consider for a minute how much you have learned about me by reading this article and hearing what I like to watch.

Put yourself in an advertiser's shoes and ask yourself how good a profile you could build of me if you could monitor what I watch when I really do have a choice. The uplink on an IPTV service is pretty much ideal for transmitting such detailed one-to-one demographics back to you, the distributor. You could be pretty sure to "know me" with a picture of my likes and dislikes over time. You can hit me with what can genuinely be called targeted ads. And, because you are in control of the content feed to my TV set, you can place personalised ads, just for me, that you know will be most likely to get a reaction from me. Even when I am watching The Bill, just like everyone else.

Labels: 4oD, catch-up TV, IPTV advertising, targeted ads, timeshift TV, video on demand

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