Comments on: Sweetness and Light http://bennett.com/blog/2008/06/sweetness-and-light/ A regular old blog Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:51:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/2008/06/sweetness-and-light/comment-page-1/#comment-426461 Richard Bennett Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:03:44 +0000 http://bennett.com/blog/index.php/archives/2008/06/13/sweetness-and-light/#comment-426461 It's interesting that on the very day that Yahoo announced they're out-sourcing search to Google, which makes Google's market share increase to 90%, the tech press is lulled into insomnia by Google's newly-invigorated commitment to a principle nobody can define. So let's not take our eyes off the ball. It’s interesting that on the very day that Yahoo announced they’re out-sourcing search to Google, which makes Google’s market share increase to 90%, the tech press is lulled into insomnia by Google’s newly-invigorated commitment to a principle nobody can define.

So let’s not take our eyes off the ball.

]]> By: George Ou http://bennett.com/blog/2008/06/sweetness-and-light/comment-page-1/#comment-426258 George Ou Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:50:45 +0000 http://bennett.com/blog/index.php/archives/2008/06/13/sweetness-and-light/#comment-426258 I'm not so sure if Google really feels threatened by P2P since P2P cannot deliver a good on-demand streaming experience beyond 300 Kbps or whatever the common broadband upstream speed is. That's the problem with out-of-order delivery from a bunch of peers that may or may not be there unless it had several times more seeders than downloaders. Since the normal ratio is several times more downloaders than seeders, you simply can't do high-bandwidth in-order delivery of video. This is why you're not seeing YouTube take a dive in popularity and every instant-play site uses the client-server CDN delivery model. The main reason P2P is so popular is because there is so much "free" (read pirated) content available. The actual usability and quality sucks compared to commercial video on demand services. Not only do you get lower quality and lower bitrates in the 1 to 1.5 Mbps range, you have to wait hours for the video to finish before you can start watching it and it even hogs your upstream bandwidth in the process. Legal for-pay services such as Netflix all use the client-server CDN delivery model because it offers an instant play experience and the video quality is much higher quality at 4 Mbps. Other services like Microsoft’s Xbox Live Market Places use client-server CDN to deliver roughly 6.9 Mbps. While it may be possible to get 6.9 Mbps from a P2P client, it’s rare that a single Torrent will be healthy enough to hit that speed and it certainly won’t arrive in order making it impossible to view while you download. I’m not so sure if Google really feels threatened by P2P since P2P cannot deliver a good on-demand streaming experience beyond 300 Kbps or whatever the common broadband upstream speed is. That’s the problem with out-of-order delivery from a bunch of peers that may or may not be there unless it had several times more seeders than downloaders. Since the normal ratio is several times more downloaders than seeders, you simply can’t do high-bandwidth in-order delivery of video. This is why you’re not seeing YouTube take a dive in popularity and every instant-play site uses the client-server CDN delivery model.

The main reason P2P is so popular is because there is so much “free” (read pirated) content available. The actual usability and quality sucks compared to commercial video on demand services. Not only do you get lower quality and lower bitrates in the 1 to 1.5 Mbps range, you have to wait hours for the video to finish before you can start watching it and it even hogs your upstream bandwidth in the process. Legal for-pay services such as Netflix all use the client-server CDN delivery model because it offers an instant play experience and the video quality is much higher quality at 4 Mbps. Other services like Microsoft’s Xbox Live Market Places use client-server CDN to deliver roughly 6.9 Mbps.

While it may be possible to get 6.9 Mbps from a P2P client, it’s rare that a single Torrent will be healthy enough to hit that speed and it certainly won’t arrive in order making it impossible to view while you download.

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