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Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in Apple, Communications, Technolust at 7:27 am on Saturday, 17 February 2007
I look forward to each Cringely Post. This one is a ripper …
Appeerances Can Be Deceiving: What’s that 40-gig hard drive doing inside my Apple TV?
The business case for Apple is downright amazing. Lowering network costs by 99 percent will enable the company to add to its portfolio the equivalent of half a Time Warner. Apple becomes a cable company without trucks or network costs. It becomes a whole bunch of cable networks with an instant audience the exact size of the iTunes registered user base, which is frigging enormous. Add $40 billion to market cap, no waiting.
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Heh - I’m looking forward to being one of the first nodes :-)
40GB ain’t much space though…
I build PVRs for the US cable industry (yes I do live in NZ, it’s a small world) - in particular I do the cable/satellite/etc network interface stuff ….
40Gb is small if you want to replace broadcast (people do like to channel flip looking for bright shiny things (or breaking news). It’s probably just enough for a non-HD PVR/VOD replacement - but I think it’s (in a US context) more a competitor for NetFlix and/or the local DVD rental
The p2p idea is brilliant (if it’s true) - another reason for net neutrality - in the US your phone/cable company provides you with your broadband and they want first dibs on the $$ providing this service - by doing this Apple is in effect putting a stake in the ground and saying “we want a place too”
Of course in NZ do you really want to have your (evil) bandwidth cap blown by your box p2ping it’s contents to your neighbour? (even if it does take the load off the fibre across the pacific)
40GB might mot seem like much, but if they offload the itunes network into it 40GB is a huge amount of music that can be steamed quite quickly and easily (easier than movies)
Or as Cringly points out, seeding before hand for a worldwide release date is feasible and an interesting scenario.
A problem I see with this scenario is payment. Payment will have to be centralized, but the nodes aren’t.
But then again, bandwidth for the managment of nodes and payment would still be cheaper than bandwidth for streaming the purchased data.
As these are mini computers Apple will suddenly be in charge of one of the worlds largest commercial grid computing projects. They could use this for anything like research (SETI, Protein Folding etc) or one hell of a ping flood ;)
for music I agree - you can cache stuff close to wherever you need it easily, for good quality full screen video (mpeg2/4 streams) it better have what you want - caching stuff in case you might want to see it is out of the question.
I’ve actually done those numbers in the past with the idea that we could download pay-per-view movies late at night so that they could be available on-demand to PPV viewers - it would mean that cable companies could afford the bandwidth for all those art-house films I like to see - main problem is that downloading 1st-run movies to people’s boxes even encrypted for a later purchase gives the hollywood people the heebie-jeebies. Steve J might be able to swing that thing (at anyone time the number of available PPV movies 90% of people actually want to purchase is in the low single digits, us foreign fil fans are freaks)
Paul isn’t the point that the network is the Apple Wireless network overlapping households? So there is no data cap as you are off the carrier network.
I assume that the service would talk centrally for billing and then seek through the peer to peer network for content.
So you want your neighbours and a string of people connecting through to large urban areas where the network is fullest.
I may need to move into an apartment block :)
We may see iTV gifting, where the upstream community shout the person of the top of the ridgeline an iTV for xmas!
well that does assume that your neighbours don’t understand WEP :-) seriously though real wifi mesh networks need a certain critical density of devices that want to speak mesh rather than traditional wifi in order for them to ‘jell’ - Apple would need to get their box into maybe 1 home out of 5 (number I just pulled out of thin air, but something in that range) for such a thing to occur. Much more likely I think they’re planning on p2p over existing broadband infrastructures - Skype for example already do this
I read it to mean that they were using bit-torrentish p2p protocols where distribution gets spread around - you download X (or Apple decides your box should cache X) and when someone else wants it Apple points to your DSL address to say “talk to Rod he has it” (most Skype users don’t realise they are already doing the voip equivalent to this for others all the time - they’re forwarding people’s packets in the background).
From Apple’s point of view sending out ‘Cars’ to 1,000,000 people doesn’t have to involve pushing 1,000,000 copies, instead they seed 1000 people who each feed 10 people who …. etc etc).
From our point of view we’re more likely to find a copy ‘closer’ to us and the ability for more server to be able to really soak our download bandwidth by pumping different bits of the file at us at the same time
Oh yeah, cool, got it
I want to slightly retract the comment I made above about ‘bandwidth caps being blown by p2p’ - since our NZ caps tend to be on downstream bandwidth only it’s only going to be an issue is Apple (or whoever) is pushing data at us that we never view - either pushing stuff to cache that we might want to use or using us for distribution.
Things like bit-torrent work by sharing a bunch of people’s (smaller) DSL upstream bandwidth across a whole bunch of people’s machines (I download 1 copy at speed X but upload many small parts of other people’s copies at upstream Y).
This is potentially usefull in NZ with our relatively thin pipe to the rest of the world provided there’s some concept of geography or net topology so that we’re feeding others locally and just feeding people in randome places like Chile or China - it could actually make things worse.
Speaking about bandwidth caps a while friend who watches his carefully couldn’t figure out how he was going over his - in the end he looked at all his incoming packets and discovered that 15% of them were compromised windows boxes on Xtra’s network trying to infect their neighbours - when he called Xtra about this - they didn’t want to know - I guess they just look at it as 15% more business ….
One assumes the fallback is to use the hard-wired network?
NZ’s network topography is not great, so I wonder how well the service will work on fall-back mode?