Tim Hwang

The mediageek radioshow airs live this Thursday, August 20 at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Evanston-Chicago, IL and online at www.wnur.org. If you have questions or comments for Tim Hwang send them to me by email – paul(at)mediageek(dot)net – or by twitter. The syndicated podcast will be posted Sunday night, or you can listen to the show on any of the thirteen other affiliates listed at the radioshow site.

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A screen shot of an online chat with an Apple rep purports to show that Apple blames AT&T for the Google Voice block. For its part AT&T says it “does not manage or approve applications for the App Store.”

It’s a tangled web at the moment, but still one thing is clear: while Blackberry and Android phone users can get Google Voice, iPhone users are blocked.

But it’s not just about Google Voice, though this instance appears to have come at the right time, with a newly confirmed and tech-savvy FCC Chairman, along with a full slate of commissioners for the first time since 2008. There are other apps you can’t get in the iPhone store, and those that are crippled–like Skype and the Sling Player–presumably to protect AT&T’s cellular voice and cable TV services from competition.

While it’s true one can still go shopping for a different phone or a different carrier to avoid some of these restrictions, it’s also true that not every carrier or phone is available everywhere. There are places where you can’t get an iPhone, and places where you can only get a smartphone by using AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. Increasingly it’s looking like the worst fears of Net Neutrality advocates have come to mobile devices first.

Veteran FCC watchers are actually amazed at how fast Chairman Genachowski responded to the Google Voice iPhone story, since the agency isn’t known for quick action. Such responsiveness may be an indicator as to how critical the potential threat is to free and open communications, given the likelihood that soon more people will access the ‘net via a mobile device than with a PC.

We’ll be discussing this topic on Thursday’s mediageek radioshow with guest Tim Karr who recently blogged about the topic for Free press.

I want to know what you think: should the FCC or Congress step in to regulate mobile cellular and broadband networks and devices? Should the government act to limit handset exclusivity and curtail the power of Apple and AT&T to reject applications that might promote competition?

I’ll be reading your responses live on the radioshow. Send them to me three ways: comment on this post, send me an email (paul[at]mediageek[dot]net), or respond via twitter.

The radioshow airs live this Thursday at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at WNUR.org. If you’re listening live we’ll also be taking your calls at 847-866-9687. The following week you can listen to the podcast archive online or on any of the 13 other mediageek affiliate stations.

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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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However, much is still unknown about Genachowski’s views on media issues, like ownership concentration and indecency enforcement. He was an assistant to Clinton-appointed FCC Chairman Reed Hundt in the 1990s, and we might learn a little bit about Genachowski by looking at his former boss’ tenure at the Commission. With regard to media ownership, Hundt opposed lifting the nationwide radio ownership cap. The lifting of the cap–which brought on the Clear Channel era–happened with the passing of the Telecomm Act of 1996 by Congress, signed by President Clinton, and was not decided by the Hundt FCC. Hundt was also a proponent of children’s programming requirements, while also pushing for indecency fines against the likes of Howard Stern.

We’re sure to learn more about Genachowski’s views on a whole panoply of communication issues when he goes up for confirmation by the Senate. Here’s hoping that his apparently progressive outlook on Net Neutrality is combined with the willingness to put the brakes on the Bush FCC’s full-speed gallop on loosening media ownership limits. I must admit that ensuring a free and open internet, along with enacting policies to stimulate high-speed broadband build-out really should be the top priority for media and telecomm, above all.

With the lessons learned from the 1996 Telecomm Act and the ill-considered experiment of taking away common carrier status from internet (therefore creating the need for Net Neutrality) there exists a blueprint for creating a much more vibrant, diverse and free media ecology.

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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 hope he’ll address the recent revelation about Comcast interfering with its customers BitTorrent traffic and how that might be affecting his company’s business model. I can’t imagine he can ignore the issue — otherwise it’ll be the 900 pound gorilla in the room (and I’ll ask the question myself).

My experience in the online media industry is that network neutrality is the issue nobody wants to talk about too much, both because regulation is rarely a popular issue, and because there is the real hope that it isn’t needed. Unfortunately, Comcast’s interference with BitTorrent traffic–regardless of whether the shared content is permitted to be shared or not–is the single most clear example of a non-neutral network in action. So I’m very curious what BitTorrent thinks about Net Neutrality now.

I’ll be sure to blog this keynote the best I can (delayed a few moments due to the fact there’s no wifi in the presentation rooms themselves).

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