Twitch is testing peer-to-peer streaming in Korea

[LargeMan]

Sharing is caring. 

[WhitetailAni]

13 hours ago, Donut417 said:

The United States of America. Comcast, Mediacom, Cox, WOW are some of the biggest ISP's with Data caps. 

WOW doesn't do data caps.

[Donut417]

A thought I just had about this. Cable companies generally give limited upstream bandwidth. This could be an issue in some cases. I know some markets Comcast provides 5 Mbps down. I get 10 Mbps. Also Comcast was caught throttling Bittorrent traffic back in the day and what Twitch is planning sounds like it works like Bittorrnet. The problem is if you over saturate the upstream you can loose your internet connection. 

 

Just now, FakeKGB said:

WOW doesn't do data caps.

"

Understanding Your Internet Data Usage

In an effort to continue to deliver the experience you’ve come to expect from WOW!, we have introduced data usage plans to residential customers in Augusta, Knoxville, Panama City, Detroit, Mid-Michigan, Newnan, and Fort Gordon markets. Rest assured, whether it’s working, learning, streaming, or gaming, the average WOW! customer will consume far less data than their plan allows and only a small percentage will ever be impacted by overage fees.

You’ve probably heard about data usage plans from other Internet providers. WOW! is committed to going above and beyond industry norms. While most providers offer 1,200 GB of data/month, some WOW! plans offer up to 3,000 GB/month! Unless you’re using servers or file-sharing applications that consume extreme amounts of data, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll go over your data allowance."

 

https://www.wowway.com/support/internet/data-usage-plans

[WhitetailAni]

Just now, Donut417 said:

Understanding Your Internet Data Usage

In an effort to continue to deliver the experience you’ve come to expect from WOW!, we have introduced data usage plans to residential customers in Augusta, Knoxville, Panama City, Detroit, Mid-Michigan, Newnan, and Fort Gordon markets. Rest assured, whether it’s working, learning, streaming, or gaming, the average WOW! customer will consume far less data than their plan allows and only a small percentage will ever be impacted by overage fees.

You’ve probably heard about data usage plans from other Internet providers. WOW! is committed to going above and beyond industry norms. While most providers offer 1,200 GB of data/month, some WOW! plans offer up to 3,000 GB/month! Unless you’re using servers or file-sharing applications that consume extreme amounts of data, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll go over your data allowance."

 

https://www.wowway.com/support/internet/data-usage-plans

Weird, when we were on WOW (before RCN bought our area and proved they were crap) we had no data caps. I went over 4TB in one month no problems.

[Donut417]

2 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

Weird, when we were on WOW (before RCN bought our area and proved they were crap) we had no data caps. I went over 4TB in one month no problems.

Its a recent thing. Started in Chicago I believe and they moved it to other markets. 

[Spotty]

2 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Not sure why people are talking about data caps...

 

P2P makes no difference to much data the end user has to upload or download for the stream. Upload is only done once (live) by the streamer.

The viewers will be acting as seeds uploading the stream to other viewers. That's what P2P (Peer-to-Peer) is. If the ISP meters uploads then it will contribute towards your data cap.

 

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/p2p-faq?language=en_US

Quote

With the use of P2P, viewers can share video content from each other if they are watching the same stream.
Viewers will be matched automatically with each other for P2P sharing if they are watching the same stream.

[Shadess]

On 8/1/2022 at 12:52 AM, Kisai said:

Then again, it may simply be Amazon/Twitch is unable to get peering arrangements(eg zero cost access) with Korean ISP's, and thus making those ISP's pay for it by having their users generate a lot of P2P traffic instead. Which is fine, ultimately the same amount of data is consumed by the ISP, it's just not consumed by Twitch.

It's probably due to something like this. I remember cloudflare talked about the cost of bw in Korea was stupid high compared to most other places.

 

This is from a few years ago, but maybe explains:

Quote

Two Asian locations stand out as being especially expensive: Seoul and Taipei. In these markets, with powerful incumbents (Korea Telecom and HiNet), transit costs 15x as much as in Europe or North America. South Korea is perhaps the only country in the world where bandwidth costs are going up.

 

[Railander]

On 7/31/2022 at 4:47 PM, TetraSky said:

Honestly they could just add a 30s delay and nobody would really care except streamers who want real time chat for some reason

 

 

[TetraSky]

2 hours ago, Railander said:

-snip-

Well see here, that's 15 minutes and way too much. For obvious reasons. But lets face it, streamers do already talk to themselves. They could pretend to talk to chat if they wanted and no one would know unless they combed through every messages that were previously sent. 15 to 30s delay is not much.

[Kisai]

46 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Well see here, that's 15 minutes and way too much. For obvious reasons. But lets face it, streamers do already talk to themselves. They could pretend to talk to chat if they wanted and no one would know unless they combed through every messages that were previously sent. 15 to 30s delay is not much.

You can set your stream to be delayed so that stream snipers can't use your stream to locate you and grief you. https://www.streamscheme.com/how-to-set-up-a-twitch-delay/ , and of course this is set by the streamer themselves.

 

 

[Stahlmann]

How does this whole thing differ from the 1080p60 setting twitch has right now? Are they trying to reinvent the wheel here?

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, Stahlmann said:

How does this whole thing differ from the 1080p60 setting twitch has right now? Are they trying to reinvent the wheel here?

From what I read in to it, they are going to be distributing the stream similar to how BitTorrent works instead of the data all coming from Twitch. Basically all the viewers will be providing some bandwidth. 

[Stahlmann]

46 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

From what I read in to it, they are going to be distributing the stream similar to how BitTorrent works instead of the data all coming from Twitch. Basically all the viewers will be providing some bandwidth. 

So they're trying to fix something that's not broken?

[Kisai]

25 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

So they're trying to fix something that's not broken?

No, they're anticipating being forced to pay for bandwidth, infrastructure, or both.

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/exclusive-france-italy-spain-call-tech-firms-pay-telecoms-networks-2022-08-01/

Quote

MILAN, Aug 1 (Reuters) - France, Italy and Spain are stepping up pressure on the European Commission to come up with legislation that ensures Big Tech firms partly finance telecoms infrastructure in the bloc, a document showed on Monday.

It has to be stated again, that "centralized control" is responsible for a lot of bandwidth wastage.

 

P2P is actually the "better idea" in all but DRM. You can have Digital Rights control, and pay a lot of money in ensuring people are paying for it, or you can discard DRM, and let the media be P2P distributed without any regard for if people paid for it. If people want the thing, "now", they will get it legally or illegally.

 

Datacaps, came about directly as a consequence of P2P taking an outsized portion of upstream bandwidth at ISP's and they were able to justify it by saying it was all piracy. Once you have a legitimate service being P2P'd, that justification goes out the window. Before ISP's imposed datacaps, many advertised "unlimited internet", and then backpedaled by metering usage, and then re-creating unlimited internet as "unmetered internet", now at 10x the price.

 

So be prepared to see that happen again.

 

The existing bittorrent protocols lack a few features that make it suitable as a general distribution system (eg no media-access keys (which limit those who can decrypt it while in transit,) no secure encryption (existing bittorrent uses RC4 last I checked, and the encryption is there to obfuscate the traffic from ISP's traffic shaping polcies. Not to protect the media.)  So to make P2P more legitimate, especially for streaming, some kind of media-key system is required, where all seeds and peers can not decrypt the stream if they are not in the "channel" the video is being played in. This also seems pretty straight forward, where the head node (eg twitch) just sends the media key every time it starts another HLS segment. (Basically a series of X second MP4 files.) Right now what happens when you stream is that the Ingest side receives a RMTP h.264 stream, and the output sends a HLS h.264 stream, which can also quite readily be ripped using off-the-shelf video downloaders.

 

And the reason it can be ripped is because, there is no access control beyond logging into twitch to get the initial HLS playlist (yes, you can even rip subscriber-only content as long as you grab the playlist while logged in.) CDN's work because of that lack of control. So swap CDN with P2P, and you see how this works. If you added a media key that is controlled by twitch, that means only those "subscribed" to the stream can decrypt the stream because twitch would only send it to those subscribed.  Presumably.

 

This is also why Netflix, Disney+, etc can be ripped. There is no actual "media access" control, it's just the same stream everyone sees, pushed to the CDN.

[BuckGup]

On 7/31/2022 at 12:21 PM, jaslion said:

Yeah so watching twitch in higher resolutions in gonna start costing people a chunk of money in terms of energy costs.

 

Also the ip thing they mention is quite concerning and gives off a lack of security features vibe

The "IP thing" is simply a public tracker it's how torrenting works and is why people use a VPN

[Donut417]

34 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

So they're trying to fix something that's not broken?

No the ISPs in Korea are going to extort Twitch for money because Twitch is dumping lots of traffic on the ISPs network. So Twitch is looking for a way to solve that problem. Fun fact Comcast did the same to Netflix and Netflix paid. 

[jaslion]

15 hours ago, BuckGup said:

The "IP thing" is simply a public tracker it's how torrenting works and is why people use a VPN

Oh I know. Its very clearly stated when starting any reuptable torrent client. Its just weird that twitch is being so nonchalant about it.

 

I also cant really 100% find if they also make a tracker of the streamer or not

[LAwLz]

On 8/1/2022 at 11:47 AM, porina said:

Not sure that will matter. I'd guess the streamer doesn't directly seed the p2p part, and will still upload to Twitch in the first instance. @Kisaiearlier post raises some interesting points about how Twitch's infrastructure might work worldwide, and I don't know enough about that to guess further. Where do they have servers to take in data? Do they have something like a CDN to better optimise regional streaming output?

What was described earlier is exactly how it works today.

When someone streams on Twitch, they upload to the nearest CDN node. That node then sends that traffic out to other nodes that are located in various regions. People in South Korea are already connecting to some server near South Korea. They don't connect to a US server just because they are watching a US streamer.

 

 

 

 

On 8/1/2022 at 12:57 PM, Sauron said:

I do wonder if you could inject your own content into the stream though.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that Twitch's developers are not complete morons. They will implement integrity checks.

 

 

 

Personally, I don't see this as a big issue.

Is it really the end of the world if I as a viewer gets to know the IP of a handful of other people who view the same stream as me? For smaller channels that only has like 2-3 viewers it might be an issue since you could fairly easily pinpoint someone in the chat and then let's say DoS them, but that's about it.

If I sniff my network traffic and see that someone with the IP 203.0.113.6 is one of the 2000 viewers currently watching critical role, so what?

[LAwLz]

On 7/31/2022 at 7:30 PM, pzspah said:

Several countries are moving towards banning made up caps for internet use because they are just that, made up and serve no other purpose than greed.

1) Data caps do serve a purpose, and don't exist just because of greed. We do not have unlimited bandwidth, and peering contracts for ISPs costs money. Data caps are a way of controlling usage.

 

2) What you are describing as "greed", is just a company making money. It's how capitalism works. And while capitalism has its flaws, you will have a hard time arguing for a proven system that pushes progress as much as it has.

 

3) Even if data caps were just made up for no reason, does that really matter? Microsoft does not have to charge money for Windows either. It doesn't cost them anything to produce a copy of Windows, so should they be forced to give it away for free? 

 

 

I don't like data caps either, and I am very glad that ISPs in Sweden don't have them. But to deny that they serve a purpose and suggest that they should be made illegal shows a lack of understanding in my eyes.

[mr moose]

The other thing about data caps is that you usually find them in places where either the infrastructure is not good enough for the population or the population is way to dense for even good infrastructure.  

 

If I had to guess I would say that sth korea and the US are at opposite ends of this spectrum with the US having big companies  that avoid spending money on infrastructure and instead monopolize the market thus needing data caps to prevent the system from completely falling in a heap while.  While sth korea has 50 something million people in a place half the size of Minnesota and no matter how good their networks are trying to give all of them full speed for everything just becomes expensive.

[Donut417]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

1) Data caps do serve a purpose, and don't exist just because of greed. We do not have unlimited bandwidth, and peering contracts for ISPs costs money. Data caps are a way of controlling usage.

 

2) What you are describing as "greed", is just a company making money. It's how capitalism works. And while capitalism has its flaws, you will have a hard time arguing for a proven system that pushes progress as much as it has.

 

3) Even if data caps were just made up for no reason, does that really matter? Microsoft does not have to charge money for Windows either. It doesn't cost them anything to produce a copy of Windows, so should they be forced to give it away for free? 

Every other metered service in the US is regulated by the government so why are not ISP's? If they want to have their caps and overages, fine. But they should be having to put a meter on the back of the house like DTE for Electric and Gas and if that meter is proven wrong then I should be able to call my government and have them deal with the issue. 

 

There have been serious doubts recently in to the accuracy of Comcast's data meter. Which btw has never been validated by any government agency. I should mention Verizon Wireless had issues with its data meter back in the day and it kept saying everyone was using 1 Meg of data and charging them $1.99. While that its not much of a charge, its pure bullshit.  Comcast even came out and said they didnt need caps, that their network was fine. SO we know they are implemented due to pure greed. 

[LAwLz]

8 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Every other metered service in the US is regulated by the government so why are not ISP's? If they want to have their caps and overages, fine. But they should be having to put a meter on the back of the house like DTE for Electric and Gas and if that meter is proven wrong then I should be able to call my government and have them deal with the issue. 

 

There have been serious doubts recently in to the accuracy of Comcast's data meter. Which btw has never been validated by any government agency. I should mention Verizon Wireless had issues with its data meter back in the day and it kept saying everyone was using 1 Meg of data and charging them $1.99. While that its not much of a charge, its pure bullshit.

I don't really see what that has to do with what I said.

Saying that data caps have some reason for existing, both in terms of making the company money and for technical reasons, is not the same as saying "the way they measure data usage is perfect and not need any oversight".

 

An independent metering system is not as practical to set up for data usage as it is for let's say gas or water. But you are free to set up your own data metering system if you want. A lot of routers even has that function built in. 

For example Netgear routers has it under "advanced setup > traffic meter". 

I am pretty sure that if you play around in Asus' traffic analyzer you can see the data for your billing period as well.

 

 

20 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Comcast even came out and said they didnt need caps, that their network was fine. SO we know they are implemented due to pure greed. 

1) Are you sure they said that? I found a tweet from someone that could be interpreted as that, but it could also be interpreted in other ways. "I manage the measurement system but don't weigh in on the business policies" is not the same as saying "we don't need it". It might also mean "we need to keep usage down because we are near our max capacity, but I am not in charge of controlling how much bandwidth our customers use".

 

2) What you call "greed" is just a company wanting to make money. I dislike this trend that seems to have happened recently where everything gets labeled "greed".

I expect to be paid when I do my job. Is that "pure greed" from me as well? The store I buy food from wants me to pay for the food. Is that pure greed too?

[Donut417]

4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What you call "greed" is just a company wanting to make money.

Its fine if they want to make money. But bending over your customers while getting welfare from the government is not the way to do it. ISP's get money for the government to expand services and to do upgrades, but they dont do either and just pocket the money. Furthermore most ISP's are monopolies as they have to competition in a given area. Where I live we have only Comcast as our wired lined ISP. No other ISP's exist in my area. Last I checked monopolies are illegal in the US and the monopolies that are legal are heavily regulated by the government. 

 

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

An independent metering system is not as practical to set up for data usage as it is for let's say gas or water. But you are free to set up your own data metering system if you want. A lot of routers even has that function built in. 

For example Netgear routers has it under "advanced setup > traffic meter". 

I am pretty sure that if you play around in Asus' traffic analyzer you can see the data for your billing period as well.

What fucking recourse do people have if Comcast's meter is wrong. Thats the point. When the government is looking over your shoulder you have a tendency to not fuck people over. Which is what Comcast needs, they need the government to check their meter periodically to make sure its measuring correctly. Doesn't matter if its practical or NOT. If its not practical then you dont have metered services. 

[LAwLz]

2 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Its fine if they want to make money. But bending over your customers while getting welfare from the government is not the way to do it. ISP's get money for the government to expand services and to do upgrades, but they dont do either and just pocket the money. Furthermore most ISP's are monopolies as they have to competition in a given area. Where I live we have only Comcast as our wired lined ISP. No other ISP's exist in my area. Last I checked monopolies are illegal in the US and the monopolies that are legal are heavily regulated by the government. 

Again, I feel like you are upset over something I am not talking about. Your replies have nothing to do with what I am talking about. It feels like I am talking to an irrationally mad person. Someone who is so mad they are basically deaf and can't respond to stimuli. I say one thing and you respond with whatever though that is currently making you mad, even though it is completely unrelated to what we were talking about.

 

I get the impression that you are very mad at Comcast and as a result you are just throwing out mindless hatred at them when it is not relevant to the conversation.

All I said as that there are legitimate reasons for why some companies has data caps, and that even those who don't have technical reasons for it should be free to make money. Calling everything and everyone making money as "pure greed" is not healthy. Not mentally (because you just end up being mad all the time) nor does it foster a healthy and nuanced conversation.

 

Me: Hey, wanna eat at McDonald's?

You: I fucking hate Taco Bell. They are so fucking overpriced.

Me: Okay... I was asking about McDonald's but...

You: I hate how they charge 1 dollar for their potato soft taco. It's so fucking expensive and tastes like shit.

Me: Doesn't sound that expensive to me, and I think it sounds pretty good.

You: Fuck you for defending Taco Bell and their anti-BLM stance. You're a racist! Did you know what they fired someone with a BLM-mask? That's how terrible they are.

Me: So anyway, wanna go to McDonald's? I'm kinda hungry and want to find a restaurant to eat at.

You: I think the government should force Taco Bell to close down.

Me: So not McDonald's? What about Burger King?

You: Taco Bell doesn't put in enough filling either.

Me: Want pizza instead?

You: I can't believe some people like Taco Bell. They should be fined for having such bad taste!

 

 

Do you understand why this is starting to get annoying?

You just keep piling on reasons for why you hate Comcast while I am trying to have a conversation. You bring up things I have never even mentioned and that are unrelated to the conversation at hand.

 

Someone said data caps were made up because of greed and I replied by saying there were reasons for data caps to exist in some situations. Even if they were "greed", the purpose of companies is to make money. Labeling everyone making money as "greedy" is not a very good way of looking at things.

Your replies to this comment have been that Comcast are bad for X, Y and Z reasons. None of which had anything to do with my post. I never even mentioned Comcast, and Comcast is not the subject of this thread.

 

 

7 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

What fucking recourse do people have if Comcast's meter is wrong. Thats the point. When the government is looking over your shoulder you have a tendency to not fuck people over. Which is what Comcast needs, they need the government to check their meter periodically to make sure its measuring correctly. Doesn't matter if its practical or NOT. If its not practical then you dont have metered services. 

1) I never said anything about how accurate Comcast's meters are. Again, I feel like you are just ranging and attacking me for pointing out that the world is not a completely black and white Saturday morning cartoon. 

 

2) Do we know or even have a good indication of Comcast's meters being wrong?

 

3) Why are you mad at Comcast for this? They can't force the government to monitor them. That's the governments job. If you want government oversight for data measurements then you need to bring that up as a suggestion and push to get that implemented through the political framework. Even if Comcast asked the government to do third party validation, chances are the government would tell them no, because that is currently not the governments job. Your anger is very misguided.

 

4) Just set up some metering yourself and IF there there seems to be a mismatch between the reported data usage from Comcast and your own measurements then you can contact them and have it investigated. You might be mad and demand control and regulations over a completely imaginary issue. How about doing some investigation into whether or not this is in fact an actual issue before you get mad about it?

[BuckGup]

7 hours ago, jaslion said:

Oh I know. Its very clearly stated when starting any reuptable torrent client. Its just weird that twitch is being so nonchalant about it.

 

I also cant really 100% find if they also make a tracker of the streamer or not

They probably assume people don't understand the technology and will freak out if they see the word tracker