ISPs have long complained about the fantastic amount of traffic consumed by P2P users. The network providers have never been keen on having their bandwidth hit so hard, especially when much of P2P's bandwidth—let's face it—consists of copyright-infringing material. But with the rise of Hulu, YouTube, Veoh, the BBC iPlayer, and many more, it's streaming traffic that now generates tremendous concern, even as P2P drops off in some cases. The shift, should it become a permanent trend, is good for everyone.
Let's do the numbers
First, a look at some data. Reliable ISP data can be hard to come by; just ask researchers like the University of Minnesota's Dr. Andrew Odlyzko. Odlyzko collects ISP data, some confidentially, for use with the MINTS Internet traffic project, but he also provided some pointers last week to new external data from two sources: a British ISP called PlusNet and a set of Japanese researchers.
PlusNet's Dave Tomlinson offers a bevy of traffic statistics from the ISP's previous year, including the fact that streaming traffic is up—way up. Streaming has jumped by 168.9 percent in a single year among PlusNet customers, even as total traffic jumped a modest 26.5 percent. Streaming traffic, the majority of it video, currently accounts for 6.6 percent of all PlusNet traffic.
In the UK, this is driven in large part by the BBC's iPlayer "catch up" service and related offerings from Channel 4, ITV, and Sky, and the Dr. Who season finale generated particularly intense traffic as people watched it the next day on the 'Net. The major TV networks in the US all offer similar services, and upstart aggregators like Hulu have also reported explosive growth. And this is without even mentioning YouTube, which takes up 6.5 percent of PlusNet's daily download-only traffic.
The rise of so many P2P alternatives, which have the advantage of being easier to use, quicker to start, and legal, has meant a decrease in P2P use at PlusNet. P2P traffic has dropped from an average of 13.4TB a day last year to 12.2TB a day this year, and now makes up only 25.9 percent of total traffic.
PlusNet's Tomlinson notes the decline and speculates, "It may be that services like iPlayer and 4OD are turning customers away from P2P downloads, or it could be stories like the filesharing letters or the proposed three strikes policy that is changing peoples’ thinking."
Certainly, the new ISP/music biz agreement on shooting off letters to identified P2P users could be playing a role here, but the same trends are seen elsewhere, including Japan. Researchers from various Japanese universities noted in a recent set of slides on Internet traffic that data showed "a shift from P2P to video (e.g., YouTube)" in Japan. (They also noted that a 100Mbps symmetric fiber optic Internet connection costs about "40USD/month," a fact which makes me weep.)
Good news all around
The shift, as it take hold around the world, benefits everyone. For content owners, the gain is obvious: the vast majority of high-traffic streaming content is legal and licensed (Dr. Who, Battlestar Galactica, Colbert Report, etc.). This stands in contrast with P2P, of course, and even though user-generated content sites like YouTube still have copyright issues, those issues are "above water" and easy to deal with.
For users, legitimate on-demand access to huge troves of high-quality video removes the risk of lawsuits, but it also has other beneficial effects. For one thing, the P2P blocking/delaying/filtering schemes being trotted out around the world don't affect most of these services. ISPs have gotten away with such blocks using the argument that most P2P is illegal anyway; without that support, it will politically be much harder to block or limit access to legal streaming in the same way.
Finally, the news might seem less great for ISPs, which have to cope with rising traffic no matter how it's delivered, but shifting the traffic to streams delivered on the web does have one tremendous side effect: it will gradually reduce the leverage that the music and video business have over them. Right, now, high rates of P2P traffic are used by content owners as a way to bludgeon governments and ISPs into cooperation with their schemes, which include filtering proposals and graduated response mechanisms.
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