S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

Mon Oct 11 20:05:21 UTC 2021

On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 1:01 AM Mark Tinka <mark at tinka.africa> wrote:

> However, in an era where content is making a push to get as close to the
> eyeballs as possible, kit getting cheaper and faster because of merchant
> silicon, and abundance of aggregated capacity at exchange points, can we
> leverage the shorter, faster links to change the model?
>
> Mark.
>

I think it would be absolutely *stunning* for content providers
to turn the model on its head; use a bittorrent like model for
caching and serving content out of subscribers homes at
recalcitrant ISPs, so that data doesn't come from outside,
it comes out of the mesh within the eyeball network, with
no clear place for the ISP to stick a $$$ bill to.

Imagine you've got a movie; you slice it into 1,000
encrypted chunks; you make part of your license
agreement for customers a requirement that they
will allow you to use up to 20GB of disk space on
their computer and to serve up data chunks into
the network in return for a slightly cheaper monthly
subscription cost to your service.  You put 1 slice
of that movie on each of 1,000 customers in a
network; then you replicate that across the next
thousand customers, and again for the next
thousand, until you've got enough replicas of
each shard to handle a particular household
going offline.  Your library is still safe from
piracy, no household has more than 1/1000th of a
movie locally, and they don't have the key to decrypt
it anyhow; but they've got 1/1000th of 4,0000 different
movies, and when someone in that ISP wants to watch the
movie, the chunks are being fetched from other households
within the eyeball network.  The content provider would have
shard servers in region, able to serve up any missing shards that
can't be fetched locally within the ISP--but the idea would be that
as the number of subscribers within an ISP goes up, instead of the
ISP seeing a large, single-point-source increase in traffic, what they
see is an overall increase in east-west traffic among their users.

Because the "serving of shards to others" happens primarily while the
user is actively streaming content, you have a natural bell curve; during
peak streaming times, you have more nodes active to serve up shards,
handling the increased demand; at lower demand times, when fewer
people are active, and there's fewer home-nodes to serve shards, the
content network's shard servers can pick up the slack...but that'll
generally
only happen during lower traffic times, when the traffic won't be competing
and potentially causing pain for the ISP.

Really, it seems like a win-win scenario.

I'm confident we'll see a content network come out with a model like this
within the next 5 years, at which point the notion of blackmailing content
networks for additional $$$s will be a moot point, because the content will
be distributed and embedded within every major eyeball network already,
whether they like it or not, on their customer's devices.

Let's check back in 2026, and see if someone's become fantastically
successful doing this or not.  ;)

Thanks!

Matt
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