Posts tagged Enough
Netflix’s Original Programming: Enough to Turn Things Around?
Feb 7th
Well, it’s official. Netflix has entered the original programming game and is no longer just a distributor of other companies’ content. “Lilyhammer,” a dramatic comedy starring “Sopranos” actor Steven Van Zandt, went live on Sunday. For the first time, the following words have appeared on the opening credits to a television-style show: “A Netflix original series.”
Rather than being broadcast on HBO, a standard cable channel or even network TV, “Lilyhammer” is going straight to audiences via the Web. Netflix hopes that by making some content available exclusively through its service, it will attract new users and potentially even gain some additional leverage with other content providers.
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This is a trend that’s been unfolding among the premium streaming services this year. Hulu, which plans to invest $500 million in new content initiatives in 2012, will be launching an original series of its own next week. Even YouTube has been putting more effort into making higher-quality content available and recently launched a substantial redesign geared toward aiding in content discovery.
2011: A Rough Year For Netflix
Netflix’s own new initiative comes after what can hardly be described as a good year for the company. Between its subscription rate increase, loss of a key content deal, botched plans to spin off its DVD business and loss of 800,000 subscribers, the latter half of 2011 alone was a bit of a nightmare for the once-beloved company.
It also comes a time of heightened tensions between Netflix and some of its content providers, who have more traditional relationships and revenue streams to worry about. First, the company lost a key contract with Starz Entertainment. Now DVDs of Warner Bros. movies are subject to a 56-day waiting period before users can rent them, and a 28-day window before they can be added to one’s queue. Netflix hasn’t exactly pushed back against such efforts from Hollywood, so perhaps it deserves part of the blame. Regardless, it’s clear that big content providers are nervous about the potential impact streaming services could have on traditional models.
Original Content: A Savior?
This being the case, the move toward original content is a wise, indeed necessary, one. Will it be enough to turn things around? It’s hard to say what kind of impact “Lilyhammer” alone will have, all the show is apparently already very popular in Norway. What’s perhaps more important is the milestone that this represents.
One of Netflix’s next forays into exclusive content will be interesting to watch. “Arrested Development,” the discontinued Fox comedy with a major cult following, will return for a new season, but will only be available on Netflix.
This will be the year that online streaming services try to position themselves as an even more attractive alternative to cable by offering their own content. Even if the new trend doesn’t destroy any legacy models, it could bolster the leverage of streaming services when it comes time to negotiate with legacy players over content deals.
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When Amazon’s EC2 Isn’t Potent Enough For Your Cloud Hosting
Jan 9th
If you are looking to virtualize some of your data center and host it in the cloud, you probably have heard about Amazon’s EC2 by now. But one IT shop used EC2 as a strawman to consider what they really needed from their eventual service provider. It is interesting and instructive to see the steps that WoundVision took for this process. The company produces a risk assessment software solution supported by infrared thermal imaging for early wound detection.
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The company is still in start-up mode and as you can imagine, collects a lot of data for its images. Building their own infrastructure was quickly ruled out: they estimated at least half a million dollars for the kinds of equipment that was needed initially. They also were looking for something that they could quickly scale, as they have big plans and expect to grow their business, not to mention their data too. They also wanted to steer clear of on-premises solutions to enable their hospital customers to get up and running quickly on their system. They first turned to Amazon’s EC2, but found that there were several limitations.
“We quickly realized there are important differences between commodity clouds and enterprise clouds,” said Andrew Hoover, IT director for WoundVision. “Amazon enabled us to cheaply host our software, but offered no support besides a forum or a for-fee service.” Amazon also wasn’t running VMware, which was important to Hoover too. Finally, they needed better security reporting and response than Amazon offered: “Amazon’s system could be under a denial-of-service attack and you would never know or be told. When I asked where records were stored, they said on the East coast. That is not good enough for us.”
Because WoundVision is storing medical records, they needed to know where their data was located and be able to get direct access to various security logs as part of their compliance efforts.
The company selected Bluelock.com, a VMware partner and their Virtual Datacenter service. “With Bluelock, I know exactly where our data is, and I can get direct access to all the firewall and security logs and reports. I always know what is going on and can report on that to be in compliance. That is extremely comforting, especially when it comes to our industry,” says Hoover.
Currently, they are just running two VMs on Bluelock’s service, but expect these to grow as they acquire new customers and will want to do load balancing across multiple Web servers. We are absolutely confident scaling this system with Bluelock will be easy,” he says.
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Google Sets Up WiFi Opt-Out Option: Is It Enough?
Nov 21st
In response to complaints from the European Union, Google now allows any router to be opted out of the location-based tracking of access point. The router can be opted out by changing the SSID to end in “_nomap.”
The Change and How to Implement …
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Is a Social Redesign Enough to Save Grooveshark?
Nov 14th
Music streaming service Grooveshark recently launched a visual refresh for its website, giving it a more social focus. Much like other freemium music services such as Rdio and Spotify, the new Grooveshark includes a news feed of recent activity and the ability to comment on other user’s listening activity.
The update seems like a logical next step, given the social features already baked into competing services, not to mention the the deep Facebook integration enjoyed by Spotify, MOG and others. The new changes also aim to connect fans with artists and provide new revenue streams, the company told GigaOm recently. It’s a worthwhile refresh, but to remain viable, Grooveshark may have much bigger mountains to climb.
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At first glance, Grooveshark appears to look and work very similarly to something like Spotify. A search for almost any artist, however, reveals what’s different. For example, typing “Radiohead” into Rdio or Spotify will bring up the band’s major releases, neatly packaged as digital replicas of they way they were originally brought to market. On Grooveshark, you’ll find rare B-sides, bootlegged concerts and fan-made remixes.
Whereas Spotify waited several months to launch in the United States in in order to secure the proper licensing deals with major labels, Groovehsark launched in 2007 and has only one formal agreement in place with a major label. Instead, Grooveshark’s approach to copyright and licensing looks more like YouTube’s did in its early days: Let people upload what they want and deal with the DMCA take-down requests later.
By contrast, Spotify will let you merge your local music files with their massive, streamable library, but crucially, it stops short of letting you upload your own stuff and share it with others. In short, it doesn’t pull a Napster.
As it turns out, this feature makes Grooveshark a little too Napster-esque in the eyes of some record label executives. Last year, Universal Music filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark. Shortly thereafter, its app was pulled from the iTunes App Store and the service has not been available on iOS since. That’s a major competitive disadvantage for any music streaming service, given Apple’s marketshare in both smartphones and tablets, not to mention the iPod. The service even ran afoul of the less restrictive Android Marketplace, from which it was removed in April.
Grooveshark’s leadership has repeatedly insisted that the service operates within the parameters of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and related copyright laws. Whether the courts agree is something that remains to be seen, but hopefully for users of the service, the (albeit limited) Napster comparison doesn’t follow Grooveshark much further.
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When Your Firewall Isn’t Enough
Nov 8th
If you ever needed ammunition for your management about getting better network-based defenses for your enterprise, a new study by F5 Networks should help you. Earlier this fall, the company asked 1000 IT managers from around the world about their existing security measures and the cost of various exploits that they have observed over the past year. Strikingly, 100% of them have observed DNS attacks and nearly as many have observed denial of service attacks, both of which are worrisome.
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Don’t know about DNS attacks? Here is an amusing video from F5 that explains the situation (and also pushes their own DNS server solutions, too.)
Here is an infographic from the survey results that shows some other trends (click to enlarge):
Of course, F5 would like you to believe that a traditional firewall isn’t enough, and one of their application delivery controllers (what we used to call load balancers back in the simple Web 1.0 days) can help boost your security. Perhaps, although there is a lot of other gear that can be purchased for this kind of protection that also go under the name of Web application firewalls too.
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UCSD Study: Not Enough Bandwidth for an ‘Internet of Things’
Nov 3rd
Yesterday’s groundbreaking proposal by IBM for a new and open-source asynchronous protocol for machine-to-machine (M2M) Internet communication, called MQTT, cites a projected 1000x (put another way, 100,000%) increase in broadband device-generated traffic by the year 2020, and the need for a formal protocol for managing it all. Now, a study from the University of California San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) projects, using data supplied by numerous sources including the FCC and network systems leader Cisco, suggests that bandwidth of that magnitude doesn’t just simply fall out of the sky.
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Without even taking into account the M2M traffic increases IBM researchers seek to facilitate, state Michael Kleeman, director Roger Bohn, and the GIIC team, the rate of mobile traffic growth is forecast by analysts to be a mere 1,800% over four years. GIIC is responsible for the annual “How Much Information?” report which estimates, as reliably as any research institution has been able to do so far, how much data is served to information workers globally through servers every year. For 2010, the number of bytes breached the 22nd power: 9.57 zettabytes.
It isn’t that the Internet is running out of room, says Kleeman, but rather that the world will run into a serious traffic jam if it continues to increase its reliance upon wireless telecommunication. There are transmission media capable of handling the data explosion, but wireless is not among them. GIIC Director Bohn is on the record as an advocate of fiberoptic.
“We have reached a point of disconnect between the capacity of wireless networks and the emerging needs of today’s customers,” writes Kleeman in GIIC’s latest paper. “This disconnect is driven largely by multimedia and multimodal Internet-based traffic, real-time applications that operate independently of user transactions, and an explosion in the use of mobile video for calling, education and entertainment. Our demand for quality high speed capacity enabled by wireless network infrastructure is growing exponentially and the technology and economics of wireless network capacity are struggling to catch up.”
Using data from Bernstein Research as his guide, Kleeman demonstrated that U.S. mobile data traffic will likely grow from 40 petabytes (40 quadrillion bytes) per month last year to 451 petabytes by 2013. He then did a little math demonstration: Assuming TV ratings service estimates are correct, and that the average consumer watches an average of five hours of programming per day, the equivalent of that being 1,266,000 petabytes of streamed data annually. With the current wireless network’s capacity to transmit data at maximum service levels, GIIC estimates, in one year’s time it would only have been able to transmit the equivalent of about three hours and twenty minutes of programming.
In a strategically placed sidebar, Kleeman adds the following little gem: “Fiber optics is an amazing technology. It can send 40 billion bits per second 100 miles down a highly engineered, beautiful glass fiber by simply using pulses of laser generated light. Need to double the capacity? No need to add another fiber; just get another color laser and send multiple colors (or frequencies) of light down the fiber. If you need more distance just add a booster to amplify the laser light and you can go thousands of miles via a medium that is protected from weather and other interference.”
Indeed, fiber may have more than enough capacity for the job, except there’s one little problem the sidebar omitted: It’s difficult to imagine all the world’s M2M traffic-generating devices, whether they follow GIIC’s projections or IBM’s, plugged into fiber – especially all the RFID tags. Perhaps this could be resolved through the use of unforeseen technologies: for example, Wi-Fi-like hotspots that are themselves linked via fiber, but which retransmit over short distances to M2M devices the way wireless routers do today. Kleeman’s paper does call upon people’s willingness to provide, among other things, “active support and acceptance of some unpopular ideas.”
However, one can only imagine the number of single-points-of-failure that could be introduced into a wireless “micro-cell” network of things. Consider, for example, the case of a grocery store whose shelf goods were all microtagged, sending active signals of their presence to the inventory system (in another country). This way, the story wouldn’t need guards to secure its merchandise. At least theoretically, that is, unless someone brought in a signal jamming device, turned it on, and walked off with several 12-packs without setting off an alarm.
There may not be enough space in the public airwaves for all the things that want to chatter with one another. But the solution may not be as simple as declaring a victor in the “wired vs. wireless” war.
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Facebook’s First iPad App Looks Sparse, Utilitarian & Good Enough to Love
Oct 10th
Facebook is rolling out its first iPad today, though at press time it’s not available in the iTunes app store where I live. Screenshots are available though and there’s not much that’s surprising in the design at least. Images are embedded below.
The app relies on big photos for most of its design strength. That makes sense. As the world’s biggest photo sharing network, there’s nothing Facebook could have built that would have pleased all of the people all of the time (hundreds of millions of people) more than a big, full-screen display of photos taken by our own friends. Newsfeed, including apps, and chat look similar to the way they look on the web. Facebook check-ins, displayed on a big map, look different and interesting. Images below, what do you think?
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You’ll be able to access the app directly once it’s available here; click the images below for full size view.
A few questions I’ll be eager to find out the answers to:
- How will the browser inside the Facebook App perform relative to Safari? Will there be anything special about it?
- Facebook on Mobile Safari works ok on the iPad, the app is an alternative to its clumsiness. Will the trade off in terms of functionality given up for stability and responsiveness found be worth it?
- Will people want to chat in IM on an iPad’s on-screen keyboard?
- Is this going to be a case of Facebook swallowing the world? What does this mean for the web? For other apps?
You know that millions and millions of people are going to be trying this app out. Hopefully it will be worth the wait.
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Google Relents on App Engine Pricing (Sorta): Is it Enough?
Sep 15th
Google did not make developers happy with its pricing changes to Google App Engine GAE. Google announced the pricing changes in May, but it only implemented a side-by-side comparison with the old pricing at the beginning of September. After a fair amount of backlash, Google is backing off. Sort of.
If you’re looking for pay for what you use, Todd Hoff says the dream is dead, but GAE will survive.
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Google isn’t backing off the pricing structure change, but the company is extending the review period to November 1st. The company is also keeping the 50% discount in place for instance prices until December 1st. By then, Google expects to have rolled out Python 2.7, which will it says lessen the number of instance hours for Python apps.
The App Engine team is also promising better analysis tools for customers, and faster usage reports. Developers should be better able to tune their apps to use fewer instances, and know how much they’re spending much faster. The post from the App Engine team also has recommendations to lower the bill, and they have a guide on managing resources as well.
Google had notified App Engine users earlier this year, but the team admits that they were too obtuse. Being notified about the pricing changes was one thing – actually seeing them in black and white clued developers in that they were going to be spending much more. Many developers were seeing price hikes of ridiculous proportions due to the change in calculating billing. Google isn’t merely upping the pricing, the company has changed the way it tallies the cost altogether. The old pricing used CPU time, the new pricing uses instance hours.
Many large applications after optimizing will end up paying 2-5x more than before. Many small applications will no longer fit into the free quota without optimization or performance tradeoffs. And many applications that only had to pay a little bit above free quota now have to pay more.
So Google is addressing some of the problems, but it’s not out of the woods with developers just yet.
Everyone Will Pay More, and That’s Not Wrong
Prior to the announcement that Google was slowing the price change, Hoff wrote a lengthy missive about the future of GAE. He says that as Google shuts down products to put “more wood behind fewer arrows” GAE had no choice but to change its structure. “GAE is moving to an instance driven model, in the Amazon style, where pricing is pegged to the fully burdened cost of real physical assets… Everyone will pay more. And that’s not wrong. GAE has every right to make money.”
However, Hoff notes that the real problem is “the speed of the change, the direction of the change, and the magnitude of the change that has thrown people for a loop. Selecting GAE was a leap of faith, and much of the anger is because many feel that faith has been betrayed.”
GAE is now trying to be an enterprise-level service, but that’s not what it set out to be in the beginning. It’s not what it was marketed as.
Conflict of Interest?
Selecting GAE was a leap of faith, and much of the anger is because many feel that faith has been betrayed.
Another problem? Part of the appeal of GAE is letting it handle the scalability problems, and letting GAE do real-time scheduling for your app. But there’s a problem – Google makes its money from instance hours now. “The scheduler is determining how many instances will run which in turn determines profitability. Does that seem like a good idea? The incentives are wrong,” says Hoff.
Hoff also says there’s a potential conflict of interest in oversubscription for GAE:
If you give a lot of RAM to each application then Google can’t run very many instances on the same machine, so RAM has been limited to 128MB on front-ends and 1GB on back-ends. Like any other hosting service the temptation is to oversubscribe these resources to make more money per machine. That will cause swapping, thrashing, etc which will cause higher latencies which will cause more instances to be allocated. That’s money in both direction.
A lot of pressure is being put on developers to optimize code to spend less money, but part of the problem lies with Google to ensure low latency. Which Google is not entirely motivated to do, given that it makes more money when more instances are run.
Google definitely has some challenges on its hands now, convincing developers that they should stick with GAE and spend the time optimizing apps for a new pricing model. No matter how you slice it, it looks like almost all GAE customers will be spending more – it’s just a matter of how much more. Peter Magnusson, engineering director at Google, confirms this: “I expect many large applications after optimizing will end up paying 2-5x more than before. Many small applications will no longer fit into the free quota without optimization or performance tradeoffs. And many applications that only had to pay a little bit above free quota now have to pay more.”
There’s also the matter of portability: It’s not easy to move from GAE to another platform if you don’t like the pricing. How many organizations are going to be willing to plant a flag on GAE ground now? I’d love to hear from developers or IT folks thinking about GAE and how this situation has effected your decisions around deploying on GAE.
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