hyperpeople :: the world is my hard drive

hyperpeople :: the world is my hard drive :: the day tv died

At the time, Monday the 18^th of October, 2004, seemed an unremarkable day. Around the world news outlets reported on the rapidly-approaching presidential election in the United States, or the latest attacks by Iraqi insurgents. In the United Kingdom, television network Sky One (on News Corporation’s BSkyB satellite television service) continued to hype that evening’s premiere of a new television series. Or, more precisely, the modern remake of an old TV series. The original Battlestar Galactica premiered on the American Broadcasting Corporation television network back in September 1978, a response to the enormous popularity of Star Wars. Starring Lorne Greene as “Adama,” commander of the eponymous starship, the series was, briefly, a huge hit for ABC. But it was painful, half-baked, and schlocky in the way only bad science fiction can be. The plots owed more to the Cowboys-and-Indians serials of the 50s than anything emerging in the “new” science fiction, in films such as Silent Running, Alien, and Blade Runner. That didn’t stop an entire generation of schoolgirls - my sister included - from falling in love with Dirk Benedict, who played the raffish fighter pilot “Starbuck”. For the under-12 set, Battlestar Galactica was must-see TV.

In 2003, the SciFi channel, an American cable television network, commissioned a film based upon Battlestar Galactica, based on a strong script written by two thirty-somethings, Ronald Moore and Christopher Eric James, who had been huge fans of the show back when they belonged to the under-12 set. Moore and James fully understood that the bar for science fiction storytelling had moved; after Star Trek: The Next Generation and its sequels, Babylon 5, and Stargate SG-1, audiences expected more realism from their characters, more fantastic special effects, and a harder edge to the storylines. This Battlestar Galactica took a cue from Alien - its universe was gritty, dark, and dangerous. The dreaded Cylon menace had taken human form - through some clever biomechanical engineering by the Cylons - and now the leading Cylon warriors were buxom blonde babes. It seems ridiculous, until, in an opening scene, one of these cyber-vixens sanguinely snaps the neck of a crying infant human. A few onscreen minutes later the Cylons stage a surprise attack, nuking all the worlds of the human federation, and chaos ensues; an ugly chaos, the a screw-the-women-and-children-first-I’m-on-this-spaceship-out-of-here sort. It’s a raw telling of a horrifying story - the extermination of the human race - and all of the main characters bear their wounds, psychic and physical, openly. In short, the new Battlestar Galactica took the core of an old idea, and made something very compelling from it.

The four-hour film premiered over two days in December 2003, and did so well - the 2^nd-highest rated program ever on SciFi channel - a series of 13 episodes was immediately ordered. These episodes were filmed over the first half of 2004, and went on the shelf, as SciFi channel searched their programming schedule for an appropriate date to begin airing the series. In order to help defray the costs of the production (science fiction television is expensive to make), SciFi had already sold the broadcast rights in the UK to Sky One. Sky One aired the film in the UK early in 2004 - it had done very well for them - and was eager to follow-up with the series, deciding to air the episodes beginning on 18 October 2004. SciFi set their own air date for 14 January 2005.

This isn’t an unusual situation; many television programs are international co-productions. PBS and the BBC often share the costs of production, and each has the right to broadcast the program in their own nation. Given that a TV set in America can’t receive broadcasts from the UK (not only is the distance too great for a television signal to cover, the signal itself is incompatible, as the US uses the NTSC format for TV broadcasts, while the UK uses the PAL system), there’s never been a problem with this sort of division of broadcast territories. Broadcasters can air programs whenever they deem appropriate, without worrying about what their co-production partners might do in their own countries. So Sky One premiered the Battlestar Galactica series without a thought about what this might mean for its American partner.

The stereotype of science fiction fans as unkempt, poorly socialized computer geeks has more than a grain of truth in it. As an audience, the fans of science fiction tend to be early adopters of technology - and that’s true around the world. These “geeks” (or “nerds”, if you prefer) often have cutting-edge technologies at their disposal, and they take great pride in showing it off to their geek friends. Over the past year, one of the most popular must-have items of geek couture is a computer peripheral that allows you to receive TV broadcasts on a PC. This peripheral translates the analog radio waves of the television broadcast into a stream of digital data which can be displayed on the computer’s screen. This means that you can watch the television and use the computer at the same time, on the same screen - which makes it a very popular add-on with the geek set. You can shrink the TV screen until it’s just a few inches across, and position it in one corner of the display. Or you can make it the desktop “wallpaper” - so that behind everything else on the computer’s screen, the TV image goes through its endless animations.

More significantly, these TV tuner peripherals also allow the television broadcast to be recorded to the computer’s hard disk. Once the broadcast signal has been converted to a stream of bits, it’s a simple matter to write these bits to permanent storage. The recorded program can be played back, right from the hard disk. This gives the computer all of the power of the VCR, without any of the hassle of tapes, which are big and bulky, get dirty, and age poorly. All of these TV tuner peripherals come with software which allows you to program the computer as if it were a VCR; give it a channel, a time, and a duration, and the computer will automatically record any television programming, leaving behind a file on the computer which can be played back later. Computers can access to the internet, something that VCRs don’t; this means the TV tuner software can scour websites looking for television schedule information, bringing it up on the computer’s display in a gigantic map of available programming. All that you need do is click on a few areas within that map, corresponding to the programs you wish to record, and the computer takes care of the rest. It’s so much easier to record a program using the computer than to program a VCR to do the same thing that these peripherals have become enormously popular - millions of them have been sold throughout the world since their introduction.

The video recordings created by these computer peripherals are often stored in a data format known as MPEG-2. (MPEG-2 stands for Motion Picture Experts Group, version 2, the second generation of a standard for the digital representation of moving images and sound.) MPEG-2 is also the format used on DVDs. It is a simple procedure to take the recording made by a TV tuner peripheral and “burn” it to a DVD. The DVD is a permanent copy of the recording; you can squirrel it away in your own collection of DVDs, you can lend it out, you can even make an infinite number of copies of it. Because these copies are digital, each copy is a perfect reproduction of the original. Unlike analog videotapes, which lose quality with every successive generation of copies, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a DVD is every bit as good as the original. One digital recording can give birth to an endless number of identical reproductions.

MPEG-2 is an old technology, by the standards of 2004. Created in the early 1990s, in conjunction with the standards for DVD, it represented the best practices of the time. But technological development has accelerated greatly in the last fifteen years; the state of the art has moved forward. MPEG-2 is commonplace - millions of DVDs are sold every day - but it’s not the best way to store a recorded television signal. MPEG-2 is “fat,” it’s clarity comes with a high price - big files. An hour of television, recorded to MPEG-2, takes up about 2 billion bytes (2 gigabytes) of storage on a computer’s hard disk. (An hour of film, which has a higher resolution image, can consume up to 4 gigabytes per hour.) That’s a lot of space on a hard drive. Most hard drives sold these days average about 80 gigabytes in size, so that means, at most, you’ll get 40 hours of television on a hard drive.

In the last few years several technologies have been developed to compete with MPEG-2, and all of them are far more efficient at shrinking a video recording down to a smaller file - with no loss in clarity. Buzzwords such as DivX, Xvid, H.264 and Windows Media 9 Series mean nothing to most people, but to a geek they spell the difference between forty hours of viewing and four hundred. A recording which soaks up 2 gigabytes as an MPEG-2 file, would only use a paltry 350 million bytes (megabytes, or MB) when recorded in DivX. Because DivX is so efficient, it even becomes possible to publish the recording on the Internet, so that your friends can download it.

The one absolute must-have for any self-respecting geek is a fast connection to the Internet. “Broadband” connections, as they are known, are much faster than the first generation “dial-up” connections, which used the phone line to transmit digital signals. The average dial-up connection runs at around 50,000 bits per second (50 Kbps), while the slowest broadband connections run at least five times faster, and a true geek has a connection that goes as much as twenty times faster, a megabit per section (1 Mbps). At a megabit per second it would take 2800 seconds (45 minutes) to download an hour-long 350 MB television program. Compare that to the three-and-a-half hours it would take to download the corresponding MPEG-2 recording of the same broadcast, and you can see why DivX and its competitors are so attractive to people who want to share their video recordings across the Internet.

Today, nearly the whole planet is wired up through the Internet, and there are millions of TV tuner peripherals connected to computers connected to the Internet. As a result there are a lot of television programs being recorded, and many of these programs are being shared. Widely. The more popular a program is, the more likely it is that will be available for download on the Internet. Which brings us back to Battlestar Galactica. The 2003 film had proved so popular that it created an intense demand for the series. The SciFi channel was banking on the rising hype to give them great ratings upon the series premiere. Sky One, recognizing the potential for a hit series (which would attract subscribers to their cable channel) rushed the series onto the air. The premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica was promptly recorded and almost immediately available through the Internet to people in the United States who didn’t want to wait until SciFi channel chose to air the series. Their audience - the geeks - knew quite well how to find the file, how to download it, how to play it, and how to share it with their friends. Within a few days of the airing of Battlestar Galactica in the UK, at least a few hundred thousand people in America had downloaded and viewed the episode. SciFi channel could see their projected ratings falling before their eyes - why would you watch an episode on TV when you’d already seen it?

With the airing of Battlestar Galactica on Sky One, an enormous shift in power, which had been going on behind the scenes, finally came entirely into the open.

Broadcasting, as we’ve known it for the last eighty years (including radio), has been a very efficient way to reach enormous numbers of people. The broadcaster puts up a radio tower, and blasts a signal out; everyone within line-of-sight of the broadcast tower can receive the signal. The broadcast tower atop the Empire State Building reaches nearly 10 million people, and the one atop Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower reaches nearly 4 million. Broadcasting is an incredibly powerful resource - but it is also a limited one. Because the radio frequency spectrum must be shared - aircraft, police and fire, military, mobile phones, satellites, all need a slice of it - it is tightly regulated. Only a small portion of the overall spectrum is available for broadcasting. Because of that scarcity, spectrum is incredibly valuable. Radio stations in big-city markets in the United States regularly sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, because of the spectrum “real estate” which comes with the purchase. Just as is said about land, they aren’t making any more of it.

Cable television got around some of the restrictions associated with broadcasting; instead of sending signals over the air, they’re carried on a wire. The entire bandwidth of the wire can be used to carry television channels - on average, about one hundred channels for analog cable, and about two hundred for the newer digital cable systems (which transmit their digital images in MPEG-2 format). Even so, there are many more cable channels available worldwide than can be carried on any existing cable system. Satellite television broadcasting offers the capability of up to five hundred channels (again, in digital MPEG-2 format), but even this is dwarfed before the number of available channels. New television channels are launched every week; unless they get “picked up” by a critical mass of cable and satellite providers, they soon go out of business.

Broadcasters, cable and satellite providers act as the distributors of television programming. They collect programs (in the case of a broadcaster) or channels (in the case of a cable or satellite provider) and pass these along to the TV audience. In this way, these providers act as “gatekeepers,” picking and choosing the programs and channels which will prove most popular and generate the highest ratings. These providers compete with each other for that most precious of commodities - your attention. Getting you by the eyeballs means they can sell your attention to advertisers. And the advertisers pay the bills. (That’s the case for commercial television; with pay television channels such as HBO, the program must be compelling enough to encourage people to pay for subscriptions.) You have access to television programming because of the sufferance of the network, or cable company or satellite provider. (???) That was the logic of television broadcasting, before 18 October 2004.

Television broadcasters have felt threatened by the Internet ever since the World Wide Web exploded into being in the early 1990s, but not because they’d ever worried that people would be watching TV programs via the Internet. Instead, they worried that people would be too busy reading web sites, answering email and chatting with friends to focus on a TV broadcast. The Internet demands attention, more so than a TV; you can zone out while you’re watching the boob tube, but you’ve got to focus while reading the electronic version of The New York Times.

Television ratings have been dropping precipitously since the late 1990s, particularly in the all-important 18 - 24 age group. It seems that the combination of video games, DVDs and Internet have given people so many options for their leisure time that TV viewing has been bumped down on the list of leisure activities. Now, more than ever, hits are vital in television programming - because there are a constantly increasing stream of alternatives to TV. The latest of these alternatives, Internet-delivered TV programs, finds TV competing against itself, in a battle it can never win.

Although people have been using “television over the Internet” since the mid-1990s, both the quality of the images (postage-stamp sized, grainy images which stuttered along, stopping and starting like a worn-out automobile) and the tiny bandwidth of dial-up Internet connections kept it from any mass appeal. As broadband Internet connections became more common, broadcasters could provide a high-quality video stream, delivered through the Internet. That’s when the broadcasters discovered something shocking and wonderful about “netcasting” - it costs a lot more money than conventional broadcasting. Consider these economics: if I have a television station, I simply put up a transmission tower, send out a signal, and I let anyone within the reception area watch my broadcast. It costs no more for me to broadcast to one million people than it does to broadcast to a single person - it’s the same signal, going out the same tower, all the time. But if I choose to deliver this signal over the Internet, I’ll need a computer (a “server,” so named because it “serves” up data to computers - “clients” - which request it) and an Internet connection to send a signal to someone who wants to receive it. If I want to send a reasonably high-fidelity signal out, I’ll need to have about 200,000 bits per second (200 Kbps) of bandwidth. But I’ll need it for every viewer. If I only have a few viewers, that’s not a problem. But if I have audiences that number in the hundreds of thousands or millions, I’ll need warehouses full of computers and truly vast Internet connections - as great as any within a research university - to deliver a stream of data to everyone who wants it. In other words, with every viewer I add, netcasting costs me more money.

When the TV industry learned this hard lesson, they believed that they had a more-or-less permanent monopoly on the distribution of television programming. The economics of netcasting meant that broadcasting would always be far more cost efficient. As the gatekeepers of programming, they could decide what would be made, what would be shown, and when it would premiere.

Just as the technology for squeezing television programs into smaller and smaller digital files has been on a constant advance, the technology for distribution of digital files through the Internet has gone through a rapid evolution. In the Internet’s earliest days, a communications protocol (protocols are rules by which computers communicate with one another) known as File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, was used to move data from computer to compuer. FTP is still very widely used, but it has taken a back seat to other protocols such as HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) which is used to transfer the pages of the World Wide Web. Both of these protocols can be used for netcasting, but both of them suffer from problem outlined above - each viewer requires a big slice of bandwidth. Consider any time you’ve tried to visit a “busy” web site (a good example would be CNN.com on 9/11) - you wait a long time before your web browser loads the web page, because so many other computers are trying to load the same page, and the server can only fulfill so many requests at a time, and can only send so much data through its Internet connection. Because the information is centralized, all requests must be sent to a single server, and all the responses must come from that server. Nothing can bring a web server down faster than hundreds of thousands of near-simultaneous requests for data. This fact is exploited by hackers, who use such tricks in “denial-of-service” attacks, when they flood a server with so many false requests for data that the server can’t address any real requests which might arrive. It doesn’t matter whether you’re serving up the news, stock quotes, or TV programs; in a centralized distribution strategy - which is essentially an Internet-based version of the classical broadcasting model of a single broadcast tower - popularity is the kiss of death.

In 2002, an unemployed software engineer named Bram Cohen, who had been working with Internet protocols, felt he’d developed an approach which could avoid the price of popularity. In fact, he believed that popularity could be harnessed and used as an advantage, rather than a disadvantage. Over a few weeks in the Autumn of 2002 he built a prototype of his new computer protocol, which he named BitTorrent. BitTorrent differs from FTP or HTTP in that there is no central server, responding to requests from client computers. Instead, all computers which want to get access to some data are considered “peers,” meaning all are equal participants in any exchange of data. That data could be a computer program, a video recording, a song, any sort of digital file. When a computer wants to get the data, it logs onto a “tracker” - a special computer program which keeps track of all of the peers. The computer gets the list of peers from the tracker, then starts asking all of the peers to share the data with it. BitTorrent takes a data file being shared and divides it into small segment. Each of these segments can be received from any peer, in any order - because the tracker has also told the computer how to assemble these segments, like puzzle pieces, into the correct order. Best of all, the computer can talk to many peers simultaneously. Rather than relying on one peer for the entire file, the computer can get five, or ten, or a hundred peers talking to it, each of them sending a little bit of the file along. Each peer only needs to share a small amount of its data, but, collectively, the computer is getting a lot of information, because it’s coming from many, many peers. The more popular a data file is, the more peers there are, and therefore there are more peers for the computer to connect to. With BitTorrent, popularity is a virtue. This means that very popular pieces of data - say, that premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica - are shared among thousands of peers just as soon as they are posted to the Internet. And that means it becomes very easy to download these files; they’ll download at very high speeds, without overloading any centralized server. Furthermore, if any one peer goes off-line - say someone turns off their computer - there are still many other peers which can pick up where that one left off. In networking parlance, this is known as “fault tolerance” - meaning that the failure of any one part of the network won’t ruin the network as a whole. (The Internet itself is highly fault tolerant - parts of it fail all the time and you only very rarely notice.)

BitTorrent is an elegant answer for the “superdistribution” of data; it harnesses the millions of Internet-connected computers to create something greater than the sum its parts - a giant, distributed system for the distribution of any type of digital information. That’s what SciFi channel is so worried about. BitTorrent is the death of broadcast television - “peercasting” is more efficient than broadcasting: it’s cheaper, and it has instantaneous global reach. In short, BitTorrent changes everything.

© Copyright 2005, Mark D. Pesce
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