February 2010 Archives

Between the fancy lawsuits and DRM shenanigans much loved by major film, TV and music industry players, and the rampant copyright infringements by individuals lies several grey industries making money from both sides.

BitTorrent is hugely popular but there are a couple of issues for users. The first is the policing of public torrents by agents for the MPAA, RIAA and so forth. Using BitTorrent from one's home computer leads to the possibility of them discovering your identity (through due legal process) and perhaps serving a lawsuit. Private trackers are just as likely to be watched by such companies and add the extra requirement that one maintain a "ratio" - i.e. that you be a good citizen upload as much as you download, since a BitTorrent swarm can only be healthy if someone is uploading.

Enter the seedbox industry.

seedbox.me

These companies will rent you server resources specifically for the purpose of torrenting. They provide high bandwidth so you can more easily maintain your ratios, and anonymity in the sense that infringement notices would first be sent to the hosting provider (most seedbox providers don't own their own infrastructure but rent them from dedicated server providers), who then forward it the seedbox provider, who then chooses what to do with it. I suspect that the typical seedbox provider would not want to put too much effort into investigating the truthfulness of any infringement notices. Seedbox services seem to start around the USD20/month mark, though these are only the purpose built seedboxes. There would be users buying VPS and even dedicated servers expressly for the purpose of torrenting.

Next protocol - NNTP, better known as USENET.

Supernews

USENET is notionally a discussion medium but is primarily (by volume) used to spread large files - movies, TV, music, games, porn etc. An industry of premium USENET providers has sprung up specifically to this end. Users of such services pay around USD10-15 per month for access with the largest players today offer retention of over 500 days. This means that if someone posts an episode of Heroes today it will be available for download until July 2011. The retention rates of these providers is constantly increasing so in reality content will be available even longer.

BitTorrent and USENET are all about downloads. What about streaming? Hulu is apparently huge in the US but I can't view it from sunny Sydney. :(

UK Proxy Server

Enter the VPN industry! Corporate types may be familiar with using VPNs to access their office networks from home, or when travelling. Services such as strongvpn.com and the not so subtly named UK proxy server will sell you VPN access to machines in the US, UK, and many other countries for the purpose of beating those pesky IP restrictions on streaming services. VPN services start around the USD10-15/month mark.

However, despite telling you how you might engage in the growing past time of copyright infringement this post isn't about that. Its about highlighting the fact that pirates are willing to pay for content, just not necessarily to the copyright holders. Keep in mind that underlying all of the above services is basic internet access - in Australia the most popular ISP plans are around the AUD50/month mark, and arguably users on higher usage plans are more than likely not using their extra quota on Linux ISOs.

The question, then, is why do consumers choose to pay these middlemen rather than copyright holders - is it the price, the breadth of content, geo-restrictions, or a straight out desire to stick it to The Man?

There's been plenty said about consumers wanting on-demand (convenient), reasonably priced access to content. Maybe the reason that the major movie, music and TV studios aren't offering what consumers want online is that they own some or all of these side channels. Not.

Whilst I snowboard, ski and now skate, I'm still not exactly the biggest Winter Olympics fanatic but something about hunting out the online streaming options appeals to me, probably because of the amazing NBC coverage of the Beijing Olympics.

This time around NBC opted to put their live streams behind a registration wall. You have to be a subscriber of one of the US cable networks, and have an online login to your provider's site in order to sign in to NBCOlympics.com. I poked around at faking a few of these registrations but gave up after a few attempts as most of them seemed to require a bill of some sort. One option that crossed my mind was to pay for someone in the US to have cable installed in order to use the online component of their subscription. To be clear I'm not that interested in the content but more so what's available and the technology. We'll come back to that idea in a sec.

Knowing that BBC has had great online streaming options for some time now I decided to see what they had. BBC are running 6 live streams which covers pretty much everything a regular punter like myself would want to watch. The downside seems to be that the streams are around 400 kbps, not the greatest of quality, but reliable.

eurovisionsports.tv

Eurovisionsports.tv streams to every country in the EU. They provide 12 EBU channels which are what I understand to be raw video feeds from various venues (i.e., no commentary). In addition they also provide access to 48 EU broadcaster feeds so you can stuff from Russia's Sportsbox, Slovakian TV and lots more languages I don't understand. :) Unfortunately I wasn't able to enjoy these streams as my crazy proxy setup was unable to sustain more than 600 kbps so the streams kept rebuffering. They serve these streams via Akamai. For the technically curious, there are 3 steps to their IP restrictions. The eurovisionsports.tv site itself will not serve you the appropriate HTML & viewer, the stream initialization performs another IP check returning XML with some sort of streamID and an authkey, and the stream itself further validates the request IP (it simply returns "closestream" if your IP does not match the authkey).

Getting access to the UK & EU streams was not very difficult. Its possible to buy a GBP5/month shell account and use that as a SOCKS proxy. If you're not familiar with this stuff you can use something like UK proxy server who provide full instructions on using a SOCKS proxy or setting up a VPN.

Finally to my home turf. I was curious what Foxtel are doing wrt online streaming but I am not a Foxtel subscriber. I coughed up $45 for the Olympics pack and added it to a friend's existing Foxtel subscription. The agreement was he watches in his lounge, I watch online. :) This won't work for everyone as it requires the Foxtel subscriber to hand over their username & password.

Foxtel

Foxtel is running 4 channels online, streaming via Akamai. The high quality live streams appear to be somewhere around 1.5Mbps and look pretty damned good. :) There's some initial delay when starting a stream -- it takes around 10s between clicking Play and the stream starting. I suspect this is due to the streams not being overly popular, and therefore the Akamai node I'm hitting (iiNet, my ISP) has to initiate a connection to the source stream.

I was going to look at the Canadian options but so far my Canadian web host has been somewhat slack to setup my account. :) I may update this post later.