A third option is to use a transparent caching box, so it caches what's seen. At $20/Mbps I suspect all the popular vendors would find three year or less ROI. Frank -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Todd Lyons Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2014 12:17 PM Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> wrote:
How would "4U of rent" and 500W($50) electricity *not* save money? Because, on top of that, we'd have huge bandwidth expenses.
I know I'm just a dumb troll, but don't you have the same bandwidth demands already from your users pulling down netflix content today?
This is an interesting conversation to watch as a non-important, non-influential outsider. Brett's calculation is the cost of: (BW of preloading X new shows a week in multiple formats) is greater than (BW of Z % of his user base watching Y streams a week) It's not been clearly stated whether X is 100% of new shows, but I suspect it's more along the lines of mostly what Netflix expects to be popular. Because that Netflix box is not an on-demand cache, it gets a bunch of shows pushed to it that may or may not be watched by any of Brett's customers. Then the bandwidth he must use to preload that box is large, much larger than the sum of the streams his customers do watch. Brett touched on this in the Security Now episode, but I don't think he was clear so I want to explore the realities of these options. IMHO two solutions exist that would make small people like Brett much happier with this Netflix box: 1) Make the box an on-demand cache: the first customer who watches a show causes the episode to stream/push_high_bw to the box, and from the box out to the customer. Any subsequent customer gets it directly from the box, even if the initial stream is still ongoing. Complications do arise if the second (or third) customer tries to move beyond the current location of the initial stream. 2) My suggestion is probably less popular because it requires a person with (maybe more than) a few minutes, but give the list of shows desired to be pre-pushed to the box to $ISP and give them a couple hours to uncheck certain things that they know or suspect their users won't watch, allowing them to reduce their bandwidth usage. And conversely, provide a checkbox of shows that the ISP wants to never be cached on the box. I did agree with the comment later in the email that making content freely cached is a non-starter because that content could be copied too easily. However, if the Netflix box is what does all of the on-demand caching in #1, then it leaves the power in Netflix's hands, while not requiring the ISP to download multiple copies of shows that its users will never watch. A lot of this is dependent upon: 1) How many different copies of a single show are pushed to the box. Does that number vary per show. 2) How many shows are pushed/pre-pushed to the box per week. How frequently. ...Todd -- The total budget at all receivers for solving senders' problems is $0. If you want them to accept your mail and manage it the way you want, send it the way the spec says to. --John Levine