Written by Om Malik
Posted Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 10:00 AM PT

 

Joost Has Some Infrastructure Challenges

With $45 million in the bank, Joost seems is all set to become a major player in the world of re-broadcasting produced content from the creative factories of large media companies. But before it does that, the company needs to overcome some technological challenges that could seriously degrade the company’s service.

At the time of Joost’s limited beta launch, the service melted down and became unavailable for many users. Despite server fixes, as recently as yesterday, tipsters were writing in to tell us the service was down again. And the underlying technologies at Joost to enable the product’s peer-to-peer streaming may make this a regular occurrence.

Joost is using a peer-to-peer version of streaming video, which means that it will have to deal with quality of service issues that come along with both P2P and streaming. Those in the technical community believe it would be difficult for the company to guarantee the quality of service of the video streams. Michael Wolf, of ABI Research on his blog, rightfully points out some of the chinks in Joost.

While Joost is not 100% P2P powered, as they have indicated they will use some servers/CDN infrastructure, they do rely on P2P in large part for content distribution. And the fact that much of their content is pretty long-tail (meaning its not exactly what most of us are hankering to watch), the chances there will be someone in close proximity to me (or in other word, a PEER in P2P) to act as a source is pretty low.

This is the weak link. If you are watching some crappy CBS program that is coming from a peer, and that peer decides to do something else with the bandwidth, there is going to be a quality hit. As Anil Gupte, in his piece “7 reasons why Joost could fail,” writes:

According to an unverified source, a Dutch ISP has tested Peer-to-Peer Streaming in the field and found that approximately 40% additional overhead is to be expected in using this technology. It is not clear whether the overhead is in the bandwidth (due to retransmission) or in processing (due to reconfiguration of the sources). However, it makes sense that there is overhead when combining buffers from multiple peers. And if one of the providers becomes unavailable, there will be tremendous overhead in reconfiguring the others.

Another big issue, at least in the near term, is the many of us have upstream bandwidth limitations; the same stuff that bogs down our use of BitTorrent. There won’t be enough bandwidth for folks to upstream shows.

In other words, Joost will have to get a lot of users in countries where there are fat upstream connections, and hope that people are consistently online watching Joost all the time. It worked for Skype, but I am not sure if it is going to work for video.

Joost, apparently is going to use some sort of a content distribution network to make up for it all, but that also means the P2P economics that worked so well in the case of Skype may not be an advantage for them at all.

For some of us who are old enough to remember Skype’s early days, the service went from a little company to one with millions of users, causing noticeable quality degradation. If that could happen in the case of voice, video brings a whole new set of complexities, and problems.

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Comments & Trackbacks

  1. [...] Continue reading Om’s post at NewTeeVee. Share/E-mail | Sphere | Print | Topic: Startups | Tags: Joost, P2P [...]

    GigaOM » Infrastructure Will Trouble Joost on May 10th, 2007 at 10:01 am - Permalink

  2. These are excellent points Om. The Internet will not withstand the surge of video, TV and film content being thrust onto IP pipes without P2P – BUT — P2P video distribution is ideally suited for complimenting traditional CDN servers, not replacing them. When seamlessly offloading peak/burst bandwidth from central servers, p2p shines. When trying to deliver across the entire long tail of content, pure p2p is often overkill and unreliable. The Estonians will innovate on this front no doubt, but they will of course rely heavily on central “super-seeds”.

    Pando Networks, a hybrid p2p media distribution platform, has spent over 2 years optimizing p2p efficiency for downloadable HD media in both one-to-many and one-to-few networking scenarios, and let me tell you, its not easy. For streaming it’s even harder to get right because the slightest performance hit is immediately visible to consumers. You have to balance three things simultaneously; bandwidth efficiency, bitrate performance and perhaps most importantly (and least talked about) minimizing the use of the consumer’s PC resources so that they don’t “feel” your p2p app. As an old push technology guy I can’t stress this enough for upcoming p2p video startups.

    Yaron on May 10th, 2007 at 10:56 am - Permalink

  3. Colm MacCarthaigh, Network Architect at Joost, gave a very infomative presentation on how Joost works at the UK Network Operators’ Forum Meeting in Manchester on April 3, 2007. URLs and other info here: http://blogs.nmss.com/communications/2007/04/realworld_p2p_j.html

    Brough Turner on May 10th, 2007 at 10:57 am - Permalink

  4. [...] about the growth of Joost and the weaknesses of the peer-to-peer model for something like video. The bottom line: It may not be as easy to do as it was for voice with Skype. joost, TV, youtube | Share This | [...]

    Networks put their money on Joost » mathewingram.com/work on May 10th, 2007 at 11:28 am - Permalink

  5. [...] te waarborgen. Het antwoord is voorlopig nee – zeker de laatste tijd zijn er veel problemen. Op Newteevee heeft Om Malik een goede analyse van de technische [...]

    aj’s spinsels » Blog Archive » $45M voor Joost - maar wordt het ook wat? on May 10th, 2007 at 11:33 am - Permalink

  6. [...] The pauses would of course last longer then, but I think it would have been a better experience. NewTeeVee reports about infrastructure problems with P2P and it could indeed be related to my own problems today. It will be interesting to see how [...]

    blog@osd.se » Joost - cool but a bit disappointing on May 10th, 2007 at 12:19 pm - Permalink

  7. [...] work of adding new channels and content with each new version, and make absolutely sure that the system will not crash with the addition of who knows how many new users each [...]

    A Brazilian Music Channel Launches on Joost » Coolest Gadgets on May 10th, 2007 at 1:10 pm - Permalink

  8. [...] streaming may make this a regular occurrence.”  We haven’t experienced what many are describing, but we’re anxious to see who else is having trouble at this [...]

    utopiaoverip.com | Welcome on May 10th, 2007 at 4:27 pm - Permalink

  9. [...] NewTeeVee » Joost Has Some Infrastructure Challenges Joost, apparently is going to use some sort of a content distribution network to make up for it all, but that also means the P2P economics that worked so well in the case of Skype may not be an advantage for them at all. (tags: media joost p2p video) [...]

    links for 2007-05-12 « Zero influence on May 11th, 2007 at 5:36 pm - Permalink

  10. [...] badalado aplicativo Joost, que promete videos sob demanada em tela cheia, está fazendo muita gente pensar. Apesar do aporte de capital recente e vários acordos com produtoras de conteúdo, a possibilidade [...]

    Joost: será que aguenta ? at Info-LESIum on May 11th, 2007 at 8:24 pm - Permalink

  11. [...] Continue reading Om’s post at NewTeeVee. [...]

    Share… » Infrastructure Will Trouble Joost [GigaOM] on May 12th, 2007 at 1:41 am - Permalink

  12. [...] defined: the potential leader will have to offer great content in a scalable way. Based on this NewTeeVee article, it is not sure Joost are fully ready for the latter point.  [...]

    .: Luc Dumont :. » Not Joost one player anymore… on May 12th, 2007 at 11:26 pm - Permalink

  13. [...] will enable P2P for .FLV clips. (Beet.TV) – Can Joost overcome Infrastructure Problems? (NewTeeVee) – CDN Startups Talk Tough (Light [...]

    NewTeeVee » P2P, Streaming and CDNs: What Will Really Work? on May 18th, 2007 at 3:00 am - Permalink

  14. [...] solved with this. But you never know. I never expected them to rush out their service this fast and face problems in the first place… « New Media Alchemy [...]

    Sriram Krishnan™ Live » 10,000 Joost invites on May 22nd, 2007 at 1:20 pm - Permalink

  15. This problem of assuring long-tail content availability is part of what we tried to solve at Mojo Nation (the venture where Bram Cohen learned many of his P2P tricks for Bit Torrent). Our solution, provide a market for pricing P2P resources (e.g., bandwidth, disc storage, etc.) so that real incentives can be offered for clients to cache less popular content.

    Steve Schear on July 23rd, 2007 at 9:34 pm - Permalink

  16. [...] Player will enable P2P for .FLV clips. (Beet.TV) – Can Joost overcome Infrastructure Problems? (NewTeeVee) – CDN Startups Talk Tough (Light [...]

    P2P, Streaming and CDNs: What Will Really Work? « Backkom’s Weblog on February 19th, 2008 at 11:04 pm - Permalink

  17. [...] site has been down on a daily basis, for a total of more than five hours. We’ve had technical difficulties with Joost in the past, and the company recently fired its CTO, but what seems to be the problem [...]

    Joost Site Experiencing ‘Unprecedented’ Downtime « NewTeeVee on February 22nd, 2008 at 9:25 am - Permalink

  18. [...] had launched its desktop client with much fanfare but for a panoply of reasons such as bandwidth limitations, software issues and lack of content. Joost isn’t the only start-up to give up backing solely [...]

    Joost To Kill Desktop Client - GigaOM on September 5th, 2008 at 8:12 am - Permalink

  19. [...] had launched its desktop client with much fanfare but for a panoply of reasons, such as bandwidth limitations, software issues and lack of content, the company lost traction and usage of its client dropped. [...]

    Joost finally discovers the browser | on September 7th, 2008 at 10:45 am - Permalink

  20. [...] a lot of resources developing a working P2P infrastructure for its client. Initially, it had some scalability issues, but it worked fairly well later on. We asked Joost CEO Mike Volpi what’s going to happen to [...]

    Joost Abandons P2P - Or Not? « NewTeeVee on December 18th, 2008 at 9:00 pm - Permalink

  21. [...] its desktop client which it has launched with much fanfare but run out of favor of customers due to bandwidth limitations, software issues and lack of content etc. Joost is expected to launch a browser based video player [...]

    Joost to Provide Browser based Video Player? Joost, Desktop client, video player, latest news | Software Reviews on January 17th, 2009 at 7:35 pm - Permalink

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