Mike Godwin notes a serious error in the recent NYT future-of-TV article:

A more important problem with the article is that it gives a false impression of the normal user experience of BitTorrent:

Created by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent breaks files hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a song file into small pieces to speed its path to the Internet and then to your computer. On the kind of peer-to-peer site that gave the music industry night sweats, an episode of “Desperate Housewives” that some fan copied and posted on the Internet can take hours to download; on BitTorrent, it arrives in minutes.

That hasn’t been my experience of BitTorrent, and I doubt many other ordinary users routinely experience the downloading of TV programs in “minutes.” On the off chance that BitTorrent speeds had suddenly improved since I had last used the application, I conducted an experiment – I downloaded the latest episode of Showtime’s program “Huff,” which stars Hank Azaria, within 24 hours of its having aired. (Downloading a program shortly after it has aired, when interest in the episode is at its peak, is the way to maximize download speed on BitTorrent.) The result? Even with the premium broadband service I have at my office, downloading Episode 13 of “Huff” – the final episode of the season – took six hours, with download speeds rarely exceeding 30KB/sec.

The NYT article seems to make a common error in thinking about BitTorrent. BitTorrent’s main effect is not to make downloads faster as the number of users increases, but to keep downloads from getting much slower. A simple model can explain why this is so. (As with all good models, this one gets the important things right but ignores some details.)

Let’s assume that a file is being offered by a server, and the server’s net connection is fast enough to transmit the entire file in S seconds. We’ll assume that N users want to download the file simultaneously, and that each user has a net connection that would take U seconds to transmit the entire file . (Generally, the user is willing to pay less for Net service than the server, so S < U.)

In an old-fashioned (pre-BitTorrent) system, all N copies of the file must go through the server's connection. That takes SN seconds. One copy goes through each user's connection, which takes U seconds. The two steps, taking times SN and U, can happen simultaneously, so the time to do both is equal to the larger of SN and U.

T_old(N) = max(SN, U)

If the file is popular (i.e., N is large), the SN term will dominate and the download time will be proportional to N. For popular files, adding users makes downloads slower.

In BitTorrent, the file only needs to go through the server’s connection once, which takes N seconds. On average, each block of the file must traverse a typical user’s link twice, since each block must be downloaded once, and BitTorrent expects each user to upload as many blocks as it downloads. So with BitTorrent, the total time to serve the N users is max(S, 2U). Recalling that S < U, we can see that

T_bt(N) = 2U

Now we can see the big win offered by BitTorrent: the download time is independent of the number of users (N), and of the speed of the server’s connection (S). Adding more users doesn’t make the download faster, but it doesn’t make it slower either. (It’s also worth noting that if N, the number of users, is small, BitTorrent is worse than old-fashioned systems, by a factor of two.)

With BitTorrent, the bottleneck is the end user’s net connection, only half of which can be used for BitTorrent downloads. (The other half must be used for uploads.) Most users’ connections, even the broadband ones, will take an awfully long time to download high-quality video content, BitTorrent or not.

The name TiVo was once synonymous with an entire product category, Digital Video Recorders. Now the vultures are starting to circle above TiVo, according to a New York Times story by Saul Hansell. What went wrong?

The answer is obvious: TiVo chose to cozy up to the TV networks rather than to its customers.

When my family bought a TiVo, it was a cutting-edge product (the TiVo, not the family; but come to think of it, the family was pretty cool too), delivering a customer experience that was hard to find elsewhere. Since then, eight years have passed – an eternity in the electronics business – and TiVo is still selling essentially the same product. Sure, they have added a few bells and whistles, but nothing that made us want to run out and buy a new box.

TiVo made a decision, early on, to cozy up to the TV networks, to stay within their comfort zone. But the networks’ comfort zone is awfully confining. ReplayTV took a different path, seizing the technological lead with new features that angered the networks; and the networks brought a lawsuit that ReplayTV couldn’t afford to defend. At the time, TiVo execs probably chuckled and congratulated themselves for their caution.

Now the time has come for TiVo to pay for its timidity. Its technology is no longer distinctive, and the rising tide of DRM threatens to cut TiVo’s products out of the TV delivery pipeline. (Remember, DRM is just another name for deliberate incompatibility.) It’s not clear what the company will have to offer future customers.

Which brings us to the key paragraph in the New York Times story:

Last week, TiVo announced that Mr. Ramsay was stepping down as chief executive but would remain as chairman. He said the change was his idea and had been under discussion for months. Several board members and others close to the board confirm that. But they also said that the board hoped to hire someone with less of Mr. Ramsay’s fierce belief in the power of TiVo’s technology. They said they preferred someone with an ability to repair TiVo’s relations with the big cable companies.

[italics added] As in so many organizations, TiVo’s response to crisis is to do more of what got them in trouble, rather than returning to the strategy that made them successful in the first place.

This is bad news for TiVo, which desperately needs new, distinctive technology if it wants to survive. It’s bad news for customers too.

UPDATE (2:00 PM): Matt Haughey has a nice response over at PVRblog.

TiVo has announced that it will overlay banner ads on viewers’ TV screens when they fast-forward while replaying recorded shows. Many commentators (such as Cory Doctorow) have criticized this move, though Kevin Werbach says it’s no big deal.

As a TiVo user, I’m not sure what to think about this. I would be happier if TiVo didn’t do it, but I’m not surprised that they’re trying to sell the ad space available to them.

There are actually two reasons I want to skip ads. First, I don’t want to wait around while the ad is on. Second I sometimes don’t want to see the ad content at all. (This is especially likely if there are kids around.) If TiVo’s new ads are only shown while I’m fast-forwarding anyway, then they won’t make me wait any longer than I would without the new ads. But they’ll still push the banner ads in my face, which might be annoying, depending on the nature of the ads.

I wonder, though, whether TiVo isn’t interfering with its customers’ viewing more than it thinks. Savvy TiVo users who are sports fans know that there’s a lot of dead time in televised games, even beyond the ads. For instance, fast-forwarding between batters of a baseball game (and between pitches if the pitcher is slow or the batter steps out of the batter’s box) can cut the viewing time for a game in half. Things are still happening during those periods, but they’re perfectly visible on fast-forward. If TiVo starts slapping banner ads over parts of the screen during these periods, this will interfere with the viewing experience.

The biggest question, I think, is whether the introduction of these ads is a single step, or the first step in a systematic redesign of the TiVo interface. The latter would be a mistake. Many TiVo users (including me) have already paid for the service, having bought a TiVo recorder and a lifetime subscription to the service, and they won’t take kindly to any reduction in the quality of the service. And TiVo will face more competition in the future as MythTV gets closer to being consumer-ready.

The music industry likes to complain about sales lost to piracy, but figures that show huge sales declines only tell part of the story. Before we blame this trend on infringement, we have to make several assumptions, including that the demand for music (whether purchased or pirated) has remained steady.

Figures available from the US Census bureau suggest otherwise. Data on “Media Usage and Consumer Spending” abstracted from a study by Veronis Suhler Stevenson show the average number of hours spent listening to music by US residents age 12 and older has declined steadily since 1998 (from 283 to a projected 219 in 2003, a 21% decline). Meanwhile, home video, video games, and consumer Internet have seen dramatic gains. This suggests that people are turning to new forms of entertainment (i.e., the Internet, video games, and DVDs) at the expense of recorded music.

Here’s the data, extracted from the Census Bureau report, on the number of hours Americans spent using various types of media in 1998 and 2003.

(Source: US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003, p. 720.)

(Note 1: We chose to use 2003 as the ending point, even though the source includes projected 2004 data, on the assumption that the 2003 Statistical Abstract’s projected data would be more trustworthy for 2003 than for 2004. Using 2004 as the endpoint would not materially affect the analysis.)

(Note 2: It is possible that part of the decline in recorded music hours may be an artifact of the study methodology. The table caption states that the data for categories including recorded music were based on “survey research and consumer purchase data”. To the extent that the estimate of music listening hours is based on survey data, it can serve as a possible cause of the drop in music sales. But to the extent that the listening time estimate might be inferred from the drop in sales, it should not be used to explain the sale drop. More methodological details might be available in the VSS report, but that is not available to the public.

However, we think it is unlikely that the listening time estimate is derived entirely from sales data. According to the same Census Bureau report (which cites as its source the same Veronis Suhler Stevenson report), per-capita spending on recorded music fell by only 4% from 1998 to 2003; the RIAA estimated a 15% drop in its total recorded music revenue over the same period. It seems unlikely that a 21% drop in listening time would be inferred entirely from a 4% or 15% spending drop.)

(Note 3: VSS wants $2000 for a copy of their report. We’re not in a position to pay that much. If anybody has a copy of the report and is able to fill us in about their methodology, we’d be grateful.)

[This entry was written by Alex Halderman and Ed Felten. If you cite this, please don’t attribute authorship to Ed alone.]

Today I’ll wrap up Vice Week here at Freedom to Tinker with an entry on porn labeling. On Monday I agreed with the conventional wisdom that online porn regulation is a mess. On Tuesday I wrote about what my wife and I do in our home to control underage access to inappropriate material. Today, I’ll suggest a public approach to online porn that might possibly do a little bit of good. And as Seth Finkelstein (a.k.a. Eeyore, a.k.a. The Voice of Experience) would probably say, a little bit of good is the best one can hope for on this issue. My approach is similar to one that Larry Lessig sketched in a recent piece in Wired.

My proposal is to implement a voluntary labeling scheme for Web content. It’s voluntary, because we can’t force overseas sites to comply, so we might as well just ask people politely to participate. Labeling schemes tend not to be adopted if the labels are complicated, or if the scheme requires all sites to be labeled. So I’ll propose the simplest possible labels, in a scheme where the vast majority of sites need no labels at all.

The idea is to create a label, which I’ll call “adultsonly” (Lessig calls it “porn” but I think that’s imprecise). Putting the adultsonly tag on a page indicates that the publisher requests that the page be shown only to adults. And that’s all it means. There’s no official rule about when material should be labeled, and no spectrum of labels. It’s just the publisher’s judgment as to whether the material should be shown to kids. You could label an entire page by adding to it an adultsonly meta-tag; or you could label a portion of a page by surrounding it with “adultsonly” and “/adultsonly” tags. This would be easy to implement, and it would be backward compatible since browsers ignore tags that they don’t understand. Browsers could include a kids-mode that would hide all adultsonly material.

But where, you ask, is the incentive for web site publishers to label their racy material as adultsonly? The answer is that we create that incentive by decreeing that although material published on the open Internet is normally deemed as having been made available to kids, any material labeled as adultsonly will be deemed as having been made available only to adults. So by labeling its content, a publisher can ensure that the content’s First Amendment status is determined by the standard obscenity-for-adults test, rather than the less permissive obscenity-for-kids test. (I’m assuming that such tests will exist and their nature will be determined by immovable politico-legal forces.)

This is a labeling scheme that even a strict libertarian might be able to love. It’s simple and strictly voluntary, and it doesn’t put the government in the business of establishing fancy taxonomies of harmful content (beyond the basic test for obscenity, which is in practice unchangeable anyway). It’s more permissive of speech than the current system, at least if that speech is labeled. This is, I think, the least objectionable content labeling system possible.