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LordMalak
join:2003-07-02
Brazil | What's the big deal, really?
These webcasters should stop whining and do what online casinos did years ago: pack their bags and move overseas. | |
wdoa
join:2001-10-16
Spencer, MA
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| said by LordMalak  :These webcasters should stop whining and do what online casinos did years ago: pack their bags and move overseas. Actually that's a no go for a number of reasons.
1) Even if you are netcasting from "off-shore" you are still responsible for paying the Royalties to the RIAA equivalent of any country you have listeners in. This is why stations like Pandora block their feeds to outside the US. They are having enough fun just dealing with the US Royalty structure, much less every country they feed into.
2) Even if you just put the servers outside of the US, if any of your operation is still in the US (announcers, Domain Registration owner, bank account, etc.) you are still within reach of the RIAA.
3). Off shore casinos have a lot more profit potential that most internet radio, hence I don't think too many companies or individuals would be willing to give up their life in the US and all connections and move lock stock and barrel to another country. | |
Time4aNAP
Premium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL
·Speakeasy
 ·Comcast
| reply to LordMalak
said by LordMalak :These webcasters should stop whining and do what online casinos did years ago: pack their bags and move overseas. Well...I suppose that when the day comes that the USA produces absolutely nothing, and is totally reliant on foreign powers for everything that it consumes, namely Communist China, that you'll have to make extreme lifestyle changes. After you've spent all of your money, and have thrown away any means to earn more, you're kind of in trouble, I reckon... | |
Michieru
zzz zzz zzz
Premium
join:2005-01-28
Miami, FL
·Speakeasy
| reply to wdoa
The sad part about the whole "blocking" situation is that someone can simply buy themselves a VPS from a company located in the U.S, run a relay and any restriction in place is eliminated.
There are so many ways to bypass restrictions on the internet it's not even funny. So online radio stations can setup an illegal relay connecting from their servers to another which handles the capacity of all their other users, while the main server is only reporting as one listener.
So by keeping listener numbers low by using relays it is possible to be exempt from the rate hike. Of course this is fraud, but I am just making an example here.
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Duct tape, saving lives since 1942. | |
Time4aNAP
Premium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL
·Speakeasy
·Comcast
| said by Michieru :...by keeping listener numbers low by using relays it is possible to be exempt from the rate hike. Of course this is fraud, but I am just making an example here. The problem is that webcasters already use relays, so it's far from a secret. And for listeners to hear the station, they need the relays' IP addresses (via URL or otherwise). That makes it very easy for the RIAA to discover that kind of fraud.
Grid networking, that uses a mesh of peers to multiply a single stream into many streamlets would be a much harder nut to crack. If the RIAA wins come July 15, I think that we'll see a lot of development in this area, as well as with anonymizing software. | |
Michieru
zzz zzz zzz
Premium
join:2005-01-28
Miami, FL
·Speakeasy
| Or if it's even technically possible a grid style VPS. Where each server acts as an internal relay connecting to one main server and when you connect to the standard stream you are randomly connected to the list of relays and the server reports only 100 users which in reality are the 100 internal relays that you are connected too, while each relay is serving at around 300 users.
You can also simulate actual customer activity by taking certain relays offline at a certain time and bringing up new ones and simply trick the subscriber count.
Of course the RIAA "has" software that tells who listened to what, so if you can screw around with those statistics you can basically fool your way across their bull.
But it's a lot of work and you will get caught eventually.
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Duct tape, saving lives since 1942. | |
Time4aNAP
Premium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL
·Speakeasy
·Comcast
| Re: Grid Networking
The beauty of splitting the stream up into pieces, with only parts going from one peer to another is that there's no reliable method to determine how many listeners there are. It's also great for stream continuity, provided you have a large enough buffer and enough peers.
Radio Paradise is experimenting with a Danish company called Octoshape. In testing I've found that the music delivered via the Octoshape grid actually sounds better, primarily due to fewer dropped packets. Radio Paradise has high-bandwidth content, and the Octoshape clients are very conservative about upstream bandwidth usage. But if push came to shove, the clients could be tuned to send out enough stream data to make the grid self-sustaining, provided that there are enough listeners willing and able to give 256 kbps or more upstream.
There's only one stream from the US to Denmark. AFAIK there are no treaties that might compel foreign companies to cooperate with discovery on civil matters in the US, and there aren't any laws requiring them to collect usage data. So the RIAA would be forced to accept any reasonable number. And since the operators of the webcast wouldn't have any better knowledge of the actual number of listeners either, nobody could accuse them of fraud.
Also, because grid networking legitimately solves a number of problems, like the high cost of serving up one stream per listener, network latency and other technical matters, there's plenty of ammunition to use against those who would liken it to illegal file sharing. It's plausible deniability at its best.  | |
Michieru
zzz zzz zzz
Premium
join:2005-01-28
Miami, FL
·Speakeasy
| One has to wonder though the more people listening to the stream the less of a load there will be on the server and it's peers itself since the pool becomes bigger the capacity increases and it's shared amongst the server and it's peers.
On top of that since more capacity is in place we can say that higher quality content can be provided with limited amount of bandwidth without having the high costs of requiring server farms to handle the entire load.
The experimentation and overall idea is grand but it will not fly in the political arena and especially with the RIAA. But it will be a nice bite in the ass for them as they try to milk artists out of their hard earned money since almost the start of the music industry itself.
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Duct tape, saving lives since 1942. | |
Time4aNAP
Premium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL
·Speakeasy
·Comcast
| said by Michieru :One has to wonder though the more people listening to the stream the less of a load there will be on the server and it's peers itself since the pool becomes bigger the capacity increases and it's shared amongst the server and it's peers. When it comes to streaming, one must be mindful of the temporal aspects of the networking. By nature, streaming data has a very short shelf life. If packet #65817 arrives a split-second late, it's useless. Grid networking addresses this issue by doing more client-side buffering than usual, and by accepting more than one stream's worth of data. That way, if Source A suddenly chokes, the client still has Source B to proceed normally with, and starts asking Source C for data, in case Source B drops out. The trick is to develop an algorithm that is as close to bulletproof as possible, while using a minimum of extra bandwidth.
What that means for the grid node when it comes to passing along those perishable packets is that, just as their own net total intake is greater than the base bit rate, so must everybody else's, in order to maintain the same level of quality. In the other hand, we have robustness. While it's possible to share a stream in bucket brigade fashion, with long chains of clients, if one participant breaks the chain, everybody downstream loses the stream. This is the main weakness of Peercast.
Although we're slicing up the stream and distributing it in a pseudo-random fashion, the same rules apply when it comes to scaling up. The only way to progress from a bunch of bucket brigades to a self-sustaining mesh is for each node to feed two or more other nodes. Anything less is insufficient for lateral traffic. And it's not a grid without lateral flow.
This is the main difference between P2P file sharing and grid streaming. File sharing stores large amounts of data, since the goal is to possess the entire file indefinitely. In that situation, it makes no difference to the client whether the segment that they need is in sequence or not, as long as they eventually get them all. But when sharing a stream, you can get only so far out of sequence before buffer underruns occur.
So a successful streaming grid needs most of the nodes to contribute a great deal of upstream bandwidth, and give the CPU priority to resend what they get ASAP. Of course almost all of the nodes are home PCs on low priority (network, not CPU) asymmetrical broadband connections. That doesn't support the goal one bit.
On top of that since more capacity is in place we can say that higher quality content can be provided with limited amount of bandwidth without having the high costs of requiring server farms to handle the entire load. That's one possibility. When Shoutcast dropped support for 192 kbps streams, Radio Paradise had Octoshape as the only means to get a 192 kbps MP3 stream to its listeners. Although RP had a 128 kbps AAC stream, and we had done a lot of critical listening tests that showed the 128 kbps stream to be at least as good as the 192 kbps MP3 stream, a lot of people wanted the larger number. Octoshape let them have their wish.
If it ever comes down to an either/or situation between conventional streaming and grid, many stations will not have the luxury of carrying the higher bitrate streams. Their listeners' basic 125 kbps upstream rates can't support more than a single 64 kbps stream, for the aforementioned reasons. Radio Paradise is unique in that it's listener-supported. The typical RP listener donates 5% of their net income to keep the station in operation, commercial-free. With proper education, people with that level of dedication can be convinced to spend a little more for the premium broadband service with 384, 768 or greater kbps upstream rates. I don't see that happening with more traditional Internet radio stations, however.
The experimentation and overall idea is grand but it will not fly in the political arena and especially with the RIAA. But it will be a nice bite in the ass for them as they try to milk artists out of their hard earned money since almost the start of the music industry itself. Well...as Igor Sikorsky so famously observed, the very best calculations that science and engineering had to offer in the 1930s discovered that given the mass, muscle strength and aerodynamic properties of the bumblebee, there was no possible way that it could fly. The bumblebee, unaware of these facts, went ahead and flew anyway.
The RIAA is an 800 lb. gorilla, to be sure. But it's neither the only gorilla, nor the largest gorilla in the international community. And make no mistake, the US hasn't been able to throw its weight around with any effect for a very long time when it comes to the Internet.
BitTorrent is well-entrenched now, and is doing business with the MPAA. And when it comes to clout, the MPAA is to the RIAA what Arnold Schwarzenegger is to Elvis...Costello. Right now there are several projects aimed at applying BitTorrent to streaming, and just as many using other technologies. And since none of these projects are based in the US, the RIAA can't do a damn thing to stop them. | |
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