On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 1:01 AM Mark Tinka <mark@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