What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

Sun Apr 27 21:24:28 UTC 2014

At some point some the MSOs and telcos tried selling CDN to the streaming video people and they didn't want to partake.  It was cheaper for them to keep streaming it off 3rd party CDNs.  There are also some weird (dumb) legal/contractual issues around Netflix (or some other video provider) negotiated content residing on a box or even within a datacenter of another company who also has contracts with the content owner.  

All cable VOD for some time has been a distributed CDN albeit proprietary and ultimately delivered via QAMs, and still unicast.  There are caches in headends and even further down in the access networks.  The next generation of that is HTTP based though so any normal HTTP cache can be used.  Comcast has contributed a bit to Apache Traffic Server as it plays a part in their next-gen video service delivery.  

I'd love to see wholesale networks. We saw that with DSL in the US quite a bit but eventually it all died out, and I highly doubt the ones running the networks would have allowed video services.  All IP will happen on cable and once that happens most of the barriers to wholesale go away.   So in 15 years things may be different. :)  

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: "John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com>
Sent: ‎4/‎27/‎2014 4:33 PM
To: "nanog at nanog.org" <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

>That is, with CATV companies like HBO have to pay companies like
>Comcast for access to their cable subscribers.

Well, no.  According to Time-Warner's 2013 annual report, cable
companies paid T-W $4.89 billion for access to HBO and Cinemax.  No
video provider pays for access to cable.  The cruddy ones like home
shopping and 24/7 religion have small over the air stations and use
the must-carry rule, everyone else gets paid something, in the case of
ESPN quite a lot.  There's a reason that T-W bought HBO and Comcast
bought NBC, to capture all that money they'd been paying out.

There's two separate issues here: one is that the Internet is a
terrible way to deliver video.  The Internet part of your cable
connection is about 4 channels out of 500, and each of the other 496
is streaming high quality video.  That little bit of Internet is
designed for transactions (DNS, IM) and file transfer (mail and web),
not streaming, so when you do stream it is jittery and lossy.
Furthermore, nobody uses multicasting, if 400 customers on the same
cable system are watching Game of Thrones, there's 400 copies of it
cluttering up the tubes.

In a non-stupid world, the cable companies would do video on demand
through some combination of content caches at the head end or, for
popular stuff, encrypted midnight downloads to your DVR, and the
cablecos would split the revenue with content backends like Netflix.
But this world is mostly stupid, the cable companies never got VOD, so
you have companies like Netflix filling the gap with pessimized
technology.  (I do see that starting tomorrow, there will be a Netflix
channel on three small cablecos including RCN, delivered via TiVo,
although it's not clear if the delivery channel will change.)

The other issue is that due to regulatory failure, cable companies are
an oligopoly, and in most areas a local monopoly, so Comcast has the
muscle to shake down Internet video providers.  That's not a technical
problem, it's a political one.  In Europe, where DSL is a lot faster
than here, carriage and content are separate and there are a zillion
DSL providers.  We could do that here if the FCC weren't so spineless.

R's,
John