Last Tuesday’s presidential inauguration was one of those moments where I think all business except for vital functions like transit and public safety stopped all over the country as people tuned in to watch Obama’s swearing in. Another thing that stopped for a lot of people was the internet. Arguably this was one of the biggest, if not the biggest live streaming video events in the history of the event. It was also one of biggest tests for streaming video over the internet, and the results were decidedly mixed.

I was at work on Tuesday, where one of my responsibilities is providing instructional media support. As soon as I got in that morning I started getting requests from people all over our building to set them up to watch the inauguration. Now, the building I work in is poured concrete monstrosity that acts like a Faraday cage, successfully blocking reception of most broadcast signals. On top of that, there’s no cable TV in building. So I advised anyone who asked about getting a TV that they should consider viewing a live stream. Then I went to go set up a live stream in a large conference room with a video projector. At that moment I realized that maybe the live stream wasn’t going to work out so well, as it took many different attempts on several different sites before we could get anything to stream for more than a few seconds. That was around 30 minutes before the inauguration was set to begin.

When I returned to my office all attempts to get a stream there–whether from CNN, Ustream or even the CBC–resulted in failure. A few minutes after the ceremony began I received an email from our central IT network department, advising us that our multi-gigabit campus network had ground to a halt due to people watching the inauguration online. Looking at Twitter and the CNN live Facebook stream I saw that we were not alone, as folks all over the internet were finding it hard to get a reliable stream.

In the end it looks like about 7 million people were able to get live streams of the inauguration, according to Dan Rayburn whose estimates are based on talking to actual content distribution networks. By any standard that’s an impressive simultaneous viewership for the internet. But it’s less impressive compared to broadcast television, where 37.8 million people watched the inauguration.

More illustrative of the difference is the number of people who were denied the ability to watch the inauguration due to capacity limits. That is, another 37 million people could have tuned in to the inauguration on broadcast, cable or satellite TV while still leaving capacity for 37 million more. Whereas on the internet 7 million appears to be the upper limit — past that nobody else could watch.

That’s because streaming internet video is based upon a technology called unicast. With unicast every single viewer is getting a unique stream of data from a video server on the internet. So, if the video stream requires a bandwidth of 256kbps, then ten viewers requires 2.5 megabits, and a hundred viewers require 25 megabits. So, how much do you reckon 7 millions viewers might require? Using my thumbnail estimations, the number is in the region of 1700 gigabits. On top of that the video provider streaming that content has to pay the bandwidth for each and every one of those viewers.

Although there are certainly costs associated with reaching larger audiences in the broadcast realm in terms of larger transmitters or contracts with cable and satellite providers, by and large each additional viewer to a broadcast channel causes no additional cost to the broadcaster. If CNN and FOX News both are able to reach 50 million households, but only 10 million tune in to CNN but 12 million tune in to FOX, there’s ostensibly no additional cost to FOX to reach those extra 2 million households. But it would be much more expensive to reach 2 million more with internet streams.

The reason why this difference is important is because so many arguments in favor of loosening ownership rules for broadcast or justifying the Clear Channelesque gutting of our broadcast media is that the internet provides a rich, nearly infinite alternative tailored to many more diverse and narrow interests. Of course, I’d be fool to say that’s not entirely true. Indeed the internet is a medium that enables many more people to become small-scale narrowcasters at very low cost compared to broadcast TV or radio. Yet, it is still ill-equipped to offer a live, truly mass media experience on the scale and magnitude that television and radio can.

Furthermore, when the a large number of so-called internet broadcasters attempt to offer up such a live broadcast experience it risks bringing the whole enterprise to a halt, getting in the way of other streamed audio or video content. By comparison, 37 million people watching the inauguration on broadcast TV posed no barrier to watching cartoons or home shopping instead.

At root the internet was never intended to be a live broadcast medium. It’s foundational technology, packet-switching, is very efficient for moving data around a diverse, multi-nodal network, and was invented specifically to allow for little pieces of data to move around out-of-sequence and even by different paths, and still be able to be put together whole and in order. It also wasn’t designed to happen in linear real time. The problem with live audio and video is that they’re fundamentally linear — the order of each frame of video and each second of sound is critical, and any misordering renders the program unintelligible. An increase in the speed of the internet combined with clever protocols and programming has made streaming live content with minimal lost data a reality, but it’s still really a hack.

One of the reasons that the inauguration was able to be viewed by 7 million online in the first place is that major content distributors like Akamai have invested heavily in edge servers. With this approach the content you receive comes from a server that is located as geographically close to you as possible, so that the data passes through as few networks as possible, putting less strain on the whole internet. I’m certain that advances in edge networks combined with increased bandwidth capacity at all levels will make the internet more accommodating to live streaming media in the future. But that day is not here yet.

I see the problems with the inauguration streams as a reality check to remind us, and especially our new policymakers in DC, that the potential of the internet as a true media broadcast alternative has not yet arrived. That day will happen only when there’s sufficient investment in and deployment of bigger pipes at all levels of the internet. Yet, this is something that our broadband ISPs don’t necessarily want to see because rich internet streaming poses competition to their cable TV business. So while with one side of their mouth they’ll point to the diversity of the internet as rationale for deregulation and consolidation, with the other side of their mouth they’ll lobby against increasing content-agnostic expansion and network neutrality because of the competition it represents.

We need to invest in our broadband infrastructure, from backbone to last-mile, while keeping the information superhighway open to all traffic, without any prejudicial tolls. It must be a truly neutral network. Only then is there the hope that the internet might be a suitable alternative, supplement or replacement for broadcast media. And until then, we owe it to ourselves to value the broadcast media we have and not to let it be starved to death in the way that’s happened since 1996.

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• Matthew reports that FCC Democrat Jonathan Adelstein is now on board to approve the Sirius/XM satellite radio merger, but only with significant conditions. This makes him commissioner #2 after Chairman Martin. Matthew also digs up some interesting dirt about Commissioner Tate tapping industry lobbyists for advice.
• John comments on the “glimmer” of hope that the FCC would take real action against Comcast for its BitTorrent filtering being downgraded to a “mirage.”
  

  After about a day and a half of happy-buzz, Martin and the FCC clarified their position – Comcast will not be substantially penalized in any meaningful fashion for its data-discrimination practices. There will be no further investigation, no priority inquiry, not even a monetary forfeiture: instead, the FCC will require the company to “disclose” its bandwidth-management practices and “encourage” Comcast to adopt more “protocol-agnostic” methods of shaping the traffic that flows over its pipes.

• Back in June John noted the current trends in FCC enforcement action against unlicensed broadcasters, observing that “the FCC is on relative track to meet its record-breaking enforcement effort of last year.” However, the FCC isn’t collecting any more financial forfeitures, and
  

  Although the FCC is getting more diligent about reducing the time between finding out about a pirate and making contact with the station, there is no obvious correlation between a diminution of stations on the air as a result.

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If you don’t quite have the four and a half hours to spare you should be able to watch an archive on the FCC website within some reasonable timeframe after the hearing is over. If you prefer a digest version, I intend to play some excerpts on this coming Friday’s radioshow.

If you prefer a text digest, at least one Twitter user is live-tweeting the hearing from Pittsburgh.

And, I write this under the assumption that somehow anything at this hearing will make a difference….

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Two interesting moments for me were when Michele Combs from the Christian Coalition testified that Comcast was blocking torrents distributing the King James bible, and hearing from Robb Topolski, the software quality engineer who first identified and rooted out Comcast’s blocking technique. Highlights from some of the expert testimony air on today’s radioshow, already online, including an excerpt from Topolski.

As I mentioned yesterday, there were several people using Twitter from the audience in Stanford, posting quick updates on the action. I found this play-by-play really valuable, since I didn’t have the luxury to pay constant attention to the hearing webcast.

One of the persons twittering from the hearing, simX, posted a compilation of tweets, along with a great summary of the hearing.

SavetheInternet.com has a short summary with links to some of the written testimony.

The FCC has archived the audio from the hearing, along with captions [Real Audio].

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I got too hung up with work to tune in right at 2 PM and the FCC’s RealAudio feeds are all full and I unfortunately missed Larry Lessig’s testimony (anyone able to record it?). Luckily there were still streams available at VON TV.

I just heard the rep from the Christian Coalition testify that the King James Bible–I believe that’s in the public domain, no?–is being shared over BitTorrent, therefore also blocked by Comcast. Interesting.

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Lawrence Lessig, C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; Rick Carnes, President, Songwriters Guild of America; Jean Prewitt, President and Chief Executive Officer, Independent Film &
Television Alliance; Barbara van Schewick, Assistant Professor of Law, Stanford Law School;
Harold Feld, Senior Vice President, Media Access Project; Blake Krikorian, Chief Executive Officer, Sling Media; Ben Scott, PolicyDirector, Free Press.

Let’s hope that real concerned citizens have a fair opportunity to give their testimony tomorrow.

The Commission will have a live audio stream of the hearing, and VON TV will host a video stream.

I’ll have some highlights on Friday’s radioshow.

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The April 17 hearing will be held in the heart of Silicon Valley at Stanford University. Free Press’ Tim Karr has written a preview of what to look for at this hearing.

Two weeks ago Comcast and BitTorrent announced that they were going to work together to ensure that BitTorrent traffic moves less impeded on Comcast’s network. This falls in line with what BitTorrent CTO Eric Klinker said at a press conference call in February, where he noted that his company would be working with ISPs on developing ways to manage traffic and bandwidth without completely blocking their protocol.

While freeing up BitTorrent on Comcast’s network is a good thing, I’m still concerned about how this sets a bad precedent that puts Comcast and other ISPs in a position to extort the developers of new internet technologies and protocols into hewing to their demands, lest they suffer blockage of traffic associated with their products. BitTorrent is now a big enough company to be able to meet Comcast at the table, but this would not necessarily have been true back in 2001 when the protocol was first unleashed on the ‘net.

Without strong, legally enforceable Network Neutrality we’re still all just dependent on the country’s largest ISPs to find it in their best interest not to block traffic or for the developers of innovative new technologies to get big enough and powerful enough to get the ISPs to negotiate.

Though I’m hesitant to give that much credit to Comcast, the cynical side of me can’t help but wonder if the hamfisted BitTorrent blocking scheme wasn’t a way to shock customers and regulators with an extreme approach to managing their networks so that some less hamfisted schemes wouldn’t seem so bad by comparison.

We may learn more about the FCC’s possible plan of attack at next week’s hearing [PDF]. In the meantime BitTorrent’s president is saying that despite doubts expressed by public interest groups he believes that Comcast will follow through on ending its blocking of BitTorrent packets. He also said that other ISPs are using blocking schemes similar to Comcast’s and that the FCC should look into those instances, too.

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The answer Navin gave at SM West was that he wasn’t too worried about Comcast interfering with its commercial application, BitTorrent DNA, because it’s a different protocol than the open source protocol. Also, he said BitTorrent would be working directly with ISPs to address any problems. He said what we’ll see is a, “bifurcation, where file sharing traffic will be treated one way, and where commercial P2P traffic will be treated very differently.” You can watch the video of the keynote yourself–fast forward to 35:32 for his answer to the Comcast question.

As I mentioned on the radioshow, my initial evaluation of Navin’s answer was that it was a clear indicator of our worst fears about an internet without network neturality: a two-tiered internet. The conclusion I drew was that BitTorrent would make whatever deals necessary to make sure its commercial clients’ traffic would pass unharmed, while the open source protocol traffic might be blocked or delayed at every turn.

So when I saw that BitTorrent’s CTO, Eric Klinker, was on a press conference call about Net Neutrality last week, I knew I had an opportunity to ask if my interpretation was correct.

To his credit, Klinker did not shy away from my question at all. He reiterated that BitTorrent is working with ISPs to see if there are ways that their protocol can work more efficiently on their networks, and noted that not all ISPs are as hostile as Comcast. Some ISPs have actively sought out collaboration with BitTorrent. I followed up asking if these bandwidth regulating technologies would be shared with the open source side, and Klinker said that is the company’s intention. He acknowledged that BitTorrent is as successful as it is because of its adoption by the open source community, and because of the openness of the internet.

And I must note that the conference call was all about support for Network Neutrality and an open internet. I featured this bit of Q&A on this week’s radioshow, now online.

While I certainly hope that we see Net Neutrality become the law of the land again this year. I do hope that if that isn’t possible that BitTorrent indeed will work to keep the free flow of P2P data going–even data that hasn’t been bought and paid for by BitTorrent’s big media clients.

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When they put that word in policies and laws, it’s usually stand in for:

We can’t or don’t want to specify specific limits here, even though we think there should be some. Um, so don’t go hog wild, OK? Please?

And, while “reasonable” often does have more specific legal meanings, that’s often the result of a court decision long after the policy or law in question was written. And usually because somebody had to go and be unreasonable and screw things up.

Today, that entity is Comcast, which, in an 80-page filing with the FCC, finally copped to the charge that the company has been interfering with its customers’ BitTorrent peer-to-peer internet traffic. The company’s defense? They were just engaging in “reasonable network management,” as permitted under the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement, which is otherwise supposed to provide for the relative open, free-flow of data on the internet.

Prior to this filing Comcast flatly denied blocking any BitTorrent traffic. Were they lying, or just engaging in “reasonable truth management?”

On the heels of this filing Rep. Ed Markey has lobbed yet another Network Neutrality bill into Congress, hoping to seize upon the growing public awareness of the actual and real attempts by the likes of Comcast, Verizon and others to filter the content on our information networks.

Of course, I think this is a good thing, even though I am a little weary of trying to get excited every time a new Net Neutrality bill or rider is announced. I also realize that the legislative process is not smooth an orderly and a certain degree of relentlessness is required. I guess that’s one reason I’m not in DC.

So, I asked a question right along these lines this afternoon in a press conference call put on by the Open Internet Coalition, inquiring, what is different about 2008 that will make the Net Neutrality effort any more successful at the FCC and in Congress?

Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn–one of the savviest people working on the issue, by the way–stepped up to answer, saying that there is just simply more momentum behind the issue now. It’s a better time, indicated by the fact that there are three different complaints regarding traffic blocking at the FCC right now. Furthermore, as the Open Internet Coalition’s Markham Erickson pointed out, FCC Chairman Martin just announced that the Commission will investigate these network management practices at its upcoming Boston field hearing.

Sohn also pointed to what she sees as sign as pressure coming from the electorate as evidenced by the win of Donna Edwards over old school telecom-pal Rep. Albert Wynn in the Maryland Democratic Primary yesterday. Edwards has been an outspoken proponent of Net Neutrality.

I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade. I hope that Sohn and the rest of the Coalition are right and 2008 is the year we’ll see Net Neutrality become reality (again). We need it and, in a strange way, Comcast has done us all favor by vividly demonstrating the abuse that lies ahead if “reasonable network management” is allowed to become, “block whatever we damn well please.”

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And don’t miss John’s Enforcement Action Database for 2007 at DIYMedia.net.

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