EXCERPTS FROM PROFESSOR ZITTRAIN’S TESTIMONY TO THE CARP

Friday, August 24, 2001

 

 

DIRECT EXAMINATION

 

 

THE WITNESS:  Okay.  So this is the general slide that's meant to be an overview of the webcasting process.  I'll try to include -- basically, do it soup to nuts without lingering unduly on any one piece.  And there's three phases to it.  The first is what happens in the webcasters' zone of things.  They've got their own equipment wherever they happen to be or wherever they sublet out and have to prepare the data to be sent to the client, to the listener.  It then ends up hitting the Internet, and ISP here is the first stop for anything hitting the Internet coming from the webcaster. But once it's into the Internet, it still has to get to its destination, and that's what this intermediate routing path section represents, the actual data getting from the Internet service provider of the webcaster over ultimately to the Internet service provider of the user -- and I'll talk about that middle part too. Then from the Internet service provider of the user, it actually makes its way down to the user where it is ultimately decoded and then played for the user to hear.

So, okay.  First is, on the webcaster side of things, getting the music in a condition to be streamed.  And I've listed here three steps for that.  Gather and preparing the data; namely, getting the music in a form in which you can start working with it on your computer.  Secondly, filing and indexing the data.  That's something if you want to do this in large scale, once you have a big pile of files, each file, perhaps, corresponding to a song you might want to stream to somebody, you have to name them, index them, take care of them in a particular way so that you're in condition to know what you have and know when and where you want to stream it.  And, finally, actually getting the data going. 

 

So, first, I should talk about getting the data off of, say, a CD.  If you want to stream music, it's likely that what you'll do, if you're not doing it live, is start with a compact disc that you could purchase at a store and you've got to get the music off of that and into the computer so that it's ready to stream out at a moment's notice when you're ready to actually stream.  To get it off the disc --  The process is called, colloquially at least, ripping.  You literally take the data off of the CD.  When it's on the CD it's actually in digital form already.  It's jut not in a very convenient digital form …

 

So for CDs, we would say they're recorded at a sampling rate of 44.1 kilohertz and in 16-bit PCM accuracy.  PCM is one common way to represent audio data digitally that, to my knowledge, has been around, basically, from the time that you started digitizing any kind of sounds whatsoever.  And, of course, you also need that for each channel, because stereo sound is two separate channels of these sounds.  So that's a lot of data.  I mean it's 44,000 samples per second times two channels timesbits.  If you then wanted to measure in bits, that's a lot of bits per second to have to be able to represent, and that ultimately ends up then filling the compact disc. Okay.  So that data is sitting there then already digitized on the compact disc, and the ripping process is a way of just extracting from the disc and being able to put it on your hard drive, and you could, in the first instance, simply make, in essence, a photocopy, an exact copy of what's on that compact disc except it's no longer just on the disc; you've copied it onto your computer, onto the hard drive.  And once you do that, you could play it on your hard drive and listen to it as if you were listening to the compact disc.

So, okay, you've got that file on your drive, and it's relatively big.  That's one reason why you might immediately start thinking about shrinking the size, and there are various tricks of the trade that are used. 

 

I've just explained extracting the data off of the CD-Rom and getting it onto your hard drive.  There's also typically some encoding that goes on, and this is hopefully worth the view -- the artists' rendition of actually extracting the data that had been formally on the left and putting it into a form that's not only moving it from one place to another but starting to do various things to it. You'll notice that now each of these hexagons, if we look at the left and we think of the things on the left as just a chunk of the wave file going from left to right, it's data that in sequence is amounting to various ultimately notes of the music.  There's reason to want to start scrambling it a little bit, not just leave it in sequence one step at a time.  And here's, basically, the process of scrambling as you move it.

Now, why would you possibly want to scramble it?  Well, this is basically what you're paying Real or taking advantage of Windows Media 4.  If you want to stream data, the one expectation you have, for reasons I'll explain shortly, is that not all the data is actually going to get to the listener.  And the question is what do you do when not all the data gets to a listener?  Now, if it's another kind of file, it's not a sound file, that could be a very traumatic experience.  You want to make sure the data gets there.  If it doesn't all get there, we might as well call the whole thing off.  For streaming audio, it's okay if not all gets there.  It just won't be the entire song.  So they'll miss a little bit; it will fade out or something.

 

This is a trick of the trade called interleaving used to make it so that if a piece of data is lost, it need not lose an entire note or section of the song.  If we spread our eggs across multiple baskets, then if we lose just one basket, it doesn't lose that entire note, it just slightly detracts from a series of notes.  So better to have three-quarters of four notes than none of one and all of the others is basically the idea behind interleaving.  So these kinds of tricks of the trades are what you get when you sign up for something like the Real server or Windows Media to be your vehicle to stream sound from where you are as the webcaster over to a listener.  It's not something you get if you just do what you call streaming MP3s, and let me talk about that by way of compression.

THE WITNESS:  Okay.  So now we get into the intermediate routing paths.  The Internet service provider of the webcaster has basically gotten the stream of data that is going out to one particular client, one particular listener out there on the other end of the Internet.  Now, we should be clear here that between what's very dim on this slide, the webcaster and this line of bits going up to the ISP, the way you contact with the ISP is typically for a particular among of bandwidth.  It may be for a certain amount of data getting pushed, period, per month, but what you have to worry about is how much data you can shove at one time into the Internet.  That's one reason to favor smaller streams even though it results in a sacrifice in quality because you could, for the same dollar, for the same buck, push more of them out than you could a very thick stream. Now, how does it get from this ISP to this ISP on the right, in the middle?  This, to me, is quite interesting.  There are a series of so-called peering arrangements by which all sorts of entities in the middle, which may or may not have contractual relationships with each other, let alone to the end point down here, the webcaster, agree to carry traffic.  So one way to think about this would almost be like a bucket brigade where a bucket gets passed to you and you, basically, if you can help get it closer to its destination, you pass it laterally off to the next person in the brigade, and ultimately the bucket gets to its destination.

So this is a brilliant way to move packets around.  It's very complicated in the middle exactly how you know who is to your left and who is to your right in the Internet topology, but that's what you use so-called routers for.  And the very routers that you're using to take in data for your own purposes, as somebody using the Internet, are often the very routers that would be used to route other people's data laterally to get it from one place on the Internet to another.

But this also explains then why quite often packets can be delayed, they can be lost, routers can get very busy.  It's just not nearly as centrally organized a scheme as something like the Postal Service or even the telephone service where you pretty much have a guarantee that when you pick up the phone you'll hear a dial tone, and when you dial you will get to the other side at the level of fidelity -- certainly baseline level of fidelity that you expect.  So that's also why I said intermediate routing paths.  It's possible that the bucket brigades aren't just little lines of pearls but basically webs of pearls, and they can -- the data can go across any number of intermediate paths to ultimately end up at the same destination.  And then so for these sorts of reasons why I say here the data packets can take different paths.  A given packet is not like a musical note floating through the air, for the interleaving for one reason, but also because the packets are typically quite small and they may even be out of order.

So that's the kind of challenge that the webcaster faces if the webcaster wants to use the Internet to stream something to somebody.  I think it's fair to say it's basically not what the original design of the Internet contemplated happening.  It contemplated getting your packets there eventually, but if it took two seconds versus ten seconds, it wasn't meant to be a big deal.  Two seconds versus ten seconds, of course, on a song could make a very big difference.

The model I've been talking about is so-called unicast, and unicast is basically the default way of doing things.  Here are three users -- one, two, three -- somewhere at different ends of the Internet.  You have the Internet service provider of the webcaster over here.  It's passing along three streams, one for each user, even if they happen to be listening to the same song.  You've got to do a separate stream for each additional user, and those streams may follow different paths along the network as they get to their respective destination. So this means for the webcaster cost-wise your bandwidth needs will be linear to the number of listeners you have.  As more people jump in, unlike broadcast radio, it's not as if the tower of a broadcast station has to work any harder for one more listener to hear it so long as the listener is already within the range.  Here it's not that way.  As you add more users, you've got to be able to supply more bandwidth even if they're listening to putatively the same music from the same data file on the webcaster's server at the same time.

Now, there are some ways that are in development to try to get around this bottleneck, which is not only a source of expense to the webcaster but a sort of a disappointment to the network.  It just seems awfully wasteful to have to be sending three of the same stream out simultaneously across perhaps even the same routers just because you have three people who want to listen.  So multicast is one way of trying to solve that problem. And multicast is a set of tricks implemented along every step of the bucket brigade such that the Internet service provider of the webcaster and the webcaster, himself or herself, can send along a single stream, and then as there are realizations along the way that lots of people downstream want it, copies can be made within the network and sent along to respective destinations.

Okay.  So this now is another way of trying to get around the linear bandwidth problem of the typical unicast model.  This is so-called splitting.  And for splitting what you do is you try to figure out, somebody tries to figure out, of all these many users over here we have, I guess, nine users in this demo, that want to hear a given stream, presuming it's all the same music they want to hear.  You may only have to send out three streams instead of nine from the Internet service provider of the webcaster, because you send them, basically, to regional weigh stations.  That's what these are.  The splitting servers that, in turn, can send out not just one stream, which is there, you can imagine even additional arrows, one each going to each of the three people in each of the three groups listed here.  So, basically, it's just a way of distributing the work around.

So a company that you may have heard of like Akamai does this kind of thing.  Their job is to station lots of splitting servers in strategic locations near lots of users who are likely to want content and then to turn around and often cut a deal with an Internet service provider or a webcaster and say, "We'll forward-stage your content.  Either if you know what it's going to be, we can just put it there.  Or if it's a stream, we'll carry the stream and multiply it on our end, and we'll do that for some particular fee."  So splitting is, I'd say currently, a more reasonable way, certainly, than multicast to try to eat away at the problem, but it also carries with it its own expense, because you've Akamai in the middle that wants to be paid for its services.

 

Okay.  By hook or by crook, somehow our stream has gotten across the cloud of the Internet to the Internet service provider of the user who has requested to hear this stream of music, and the bits come along the last leg of the journey into the computer of the user.  Now, if it's to be a Real stream, a stream encoded by the Real software, as the user, you're going to have to be able to have software on your computer that understands Real.  So you might have to have the Real Player or some variant of it as a counterpart to be able to listen to a Real stream.  And part of the way Real operates is to not just distribute Real Players to users, although you can do that.  You can go to Real and download a player so that as a user of a computer you can hear a Real stream.  But it also basically arranges to get the player engine into the hands of third parties. So you can go as a user to a third party site that says, "Come listen to our webcast.  You just need to download our software here."  What you maybe are downloading is the Real engine underneath -- it's basically the Real Player -- but it looks a lot different, because it's been customized by that third party to basically be branded as theirs.  But if that third party is to be offering you music, they're going to have the Real server on one end serving it up and the Real Player on the other, whether or not it literally says Real to the eyes of the user to hear it.  The same goes for Windows Media, and the same would go for so-called MP3 streaming. If you're going to send an MP3 file streaming to a user, you need something on the user's end capable of playing the stream.  The most common software on the Windows platform for that is WinAmp.  WinAmp is a player, among other things, for MP3 streams.  In the first instance, it's meant to just play MP3 files, files that have already arrived on your computer and are sitting there waiting to be played.  But it can also tune in to this kind of stream coming in and play the packets as it hears them and not bother to record the packets to the hard disc as it converts them for the user's purposes. Now, maybe I should just zoom in for a second on the user's computer to say what's happening as these packets come swimming in.  So they arrive like so, and the first job of the operating system of the user's computer is to get rid of all the packaging, basically to unpack the goodies.  So all of that stuff goes away.  Those were the things that got it ready for transmission over the Internet.  Now, it's where it wants to be.  And now you've got to somehow make these packets useful.  You've basically got to do exactly the inverse of what was done to package them up for shipping over the Internet. So here they are.  They get bigger again.  It might be useful to think of this as unpacking your suit out of your suit bag.  It looks pretty like it did when you packed it, although it's a little bit rumpled, because once you've uncompressed it, if it's this so-called LOSSY compression algorithm, the resulting bigger packets aren't going to be identical to the big packets that the webcaster started with before compressing it.  The act of compression is losing something, and when you uncompress it, there are just approximations where real data had been -- this is real with a lower case "r" -- in the first instance.

Now, of course, just uncompressed these particular packets aren't very useful either in this example, because these are packets that I'm hypothesizing have been created by the Real server.  The only way they're useful is for the Real Player to make sense of them, as I said, and that's the media engine I'm talking about.  So it's the Real Player that's going to know, basically, how to decode those packets back into what's now appearing on the left as a snippet of music that is prepared to be played. And with this kind of object on the left, a snippet of music that looks an awful lot like what could come from any sound source that's no longer brand specific.  This is what will be sent out to the sound card.  Sound cards usually get their data in that PCM I was talking about, right, 44.1 kilohertz, 16-bit, two-channel.  And it's then the sound card's job to send the proper signal out of basically a headphone jack or speaker jack so it can play over the speakers of the computer.  So those are the slides.  Maybe I should see if there are questions on any of that?

 

 

Q     Okay.  And from the user's perspective, when the user clicks on some link or an icon in his computer because he wants to hear streaming music, what is it that's happening from the user's computer going back the other way?

 

 

A     When a user clicks on a link to say, "I want to hear streaming music."  So suppose the link is on a web page.  If it's on a web page, you click on that link, the first thing the link has to do, typically, is instruct the computer, "Wait a minute.  I'm not just in webland anymore," because Internet browsers are not typically designed to stream music.  They're meant to browse the Internet. So the first thing that link does when you click on it is it gives information to your computer that says, "It's time to fire up a media engine of some kind."  So that may be WinAmp, it might be the Real Player, it might be the Windows Media Player, it could be Quick Time, I don't know, one of these engines. The engine may be, literally, a separate application.  So Spinner appears as a separate thing for you to play with.  Or it might be embedded in the web page.  One of the nice things that Real or Windows Media can do is embed itself in the web page so from the user's point of view they don't know their browser doesn't know about streaming.  It sure looks like it does, because the browser basically makes a little plot of real estate on the screen, and media engine goes here and then the media engine goes there. At that moment then, the media engine needs to know from where it is going to listen to a stream, and that may be data passed to it from the link that you clicked on or even a very small file that's encoded that says, "This is the location to go on the Internet to knock on the proper door to get the stream you're looking for back."  And that door to knock on is somewhere over here on the server.  So it's often the media engine that does the knocking, and then the server that starts sending the stream and connecting back to the engine. There may also be a brief so-called handshake going on where the engine knocks on the door, the server says, "Who are you?"  "I'm a Real Player.  I'd like a stream, please."  "At what rate do you expect this stream?"  "At what rate are you connected?"

 

And I don't know yet if I've spoken sufficiently to connection rates and that sort of thing.  If you are a server, you may want to send a stream out to somebody you know is connected only at 28.8 orkilo -- Kbps, kilobits per second -- that's the maximum they can take -- than you would to somebody who purports to be connected at a T-1 line, which is much thicker pipe.  So you don't want to end up sending out your data at a faster rate than you know you client can digest it, because then they've got to deal with buffering problems, and the middle of the Internet is going to start passing it along as fast as it can, but there will be, again, variations along the whole route.

 

That also reminds me, I should add, because of the uncertainties within the intermediate routing paths, even if you have paid your ISP as a webcaster a lot for a lot of bandwidth and even if the user has paid her ISP a lot for bandwidth, some bad connection in the middle could make it all moot.  The convoy can only go as slow as the slowest ship, so you may have to worry about the intermediate paths being the things that slow down the streams.

 

Q     Okay.  And in terms of cost structure from the perspective of the webcaster?

 

A     Oh, yes.  So for cost structure, if you're a webcaster, the best I can see is -- and there's some data on cost structure in my testimony from this one streaming media survey company -- to an order of magnitude, we're talking maybe $1,000 a month for a T- 1 line.  A thousand dollars a month gets you 1.44 megabits per second, which is to say 1,500 kilobits per second.  So you could divide 1,500 kilobits per second over the number of streams you want to carry that are a certain, themselves, number of kilobits per second.  I don't know if it would be dangerous to pull out the calculator, but it would be more dangerous for me to do it in my head.  All right.  So there's the calculator.  This is always dangerous. So 1,544 kilobits per second divided by a 40-kilobit per second stream gives you 38.6 streams you can manage on the best of days.  This means sunny skies on the Internet, sunny skies between you and the ISP.  You've got a dedicated T-1.  You're basically able, at that resolution, at a 40K stream, you can host roughlystreams, I guess only just because I really want to get it right, not because I'm entirely clueless.

 

BY MR. COHEN:

Q     Now, the Panel has heard visions of a future where CD quality streaming will be ubiquitous.  Can you -- relating back to the process that you've described, tell us what would need to take place in order for that world to come into being.

 

A     Well, in order to get CD quality out to everybody, first you need to get streams that when people listen to them they say, "Boy, that sounds a lot like a CD."  Now, that, of course, is as much art as it is craft, but in my experience the absolute -- the most I'd be willing to sacrifice and still say, "All right, it's CD quality," if I'm listening to a stream, would bekilobit on Windows Media.  I'm not all that excited to say it, but Windows Media seems to have the best secret sauce as far as compression goes, and their 96-kilobit stream is pretty good. It's different than, say, an MP3 96- kilobit stream.  If I want CD quality on MP3, I may want -- I do want 128 kilobits per second.  That's substantially more than a 40-kilobit or a 20-kilobit per second stream.  So on the webcaster side of things, given that they're paying 1,000 bucks a month for that T-1 that could hold whatever a calculator said, it could hold40-kilobit streams, if you want to make those 80-kilobit streams, you've cut in half the number of streams you can serve simultaneously with that bandwidth, and so on. So from the cost perspective, it's quite expensive to upgrade the quality going out.  That's why it's really hard for professional webcasters to find high bit rate streams available to listen to even if you've got the equipment on your end to do it.  Then you have to worry about the quality of stuff in the middle, which is anybody's guess at times as to how that will work.  And then the connection here between the Internet service provider nearest the user and the user, that has to be upgraded as well.  There's only so much that copper wire can be asked to do, and in my estimation, we're at its limit.  So you can try to get clever with codecs, but there's been a lot of time with people doing that.  I think we're kind of running out of rabbits to pull out of that hat to make better quality out of what compression you have. And when I say out of copper wires, I mean the kind of copper wires that are sitting on my street in Cambridge that some of them were screwed in last at the time of King George.  They are -- you know, they're not geared for high bandwidth transmissions.

The process of offering somebody high-speed Internet, like DSL, is to make sure you do have wires, maybe copper, that are very well outfitted, and that process can take a while.  And what I've read we're talking that at the present something on the order of at least 80 percent of American consumers who get their Internet are getting it over regular phone lines using modems, which is, at most, then, we're talking the 56K and typically less than that.  And you're not going to get CD quality over 56K any time soon; it's just not going to happen, I don't think.

 

 

ARBITRATOR VON KANN:  And there are some of us who can actually live with something slightly less than exact CD quality.

 

THE WITNESS:  Yes.

 

ARBITRATOR VON KANN:  I suppose the really pertinent question is not when it will precisely duplicate but when it will get to a level of quality that is reasonably acceptable to a lot of people.

 

THE WITNESS:  Right.

 

ARBITRATOR VON KANN:  Do you have any sense of when that will come about?

THE WITNESS:  Well, it's certainly one of those crystal ball questions.  I do think that we've gone pretty far with the codecs that we have, which is to say Microsoft hired a bunch of really smart mathematicians to just really make 96K good, and they've run out of things to do.  And I don't know that more mathematicians staring at it over time will make it much better.

So if people could learn to be happy with 40K streams, okay, that's not bad, but I do think it's fair to say it is FM quality.  I mean most ears are going to tell the difference, especially to the extent that you try to make other pieces of the chain more robust.  So you replace your tinny speakers with really good speakers, suddenly listening to the 40K stream isn't as adequate as it was when you couldn't tell the difference anyway because of your speakers.

 

CHAIRMAN VAN LOON:  I'm trying to remember, isCD quality?

 

THE WITNESS:  No, no, no.  To answer the question -- I mean the first way to answer what CD quality is --

 

CHAIRMAN VAN LOON:  I'm sorry, I meant FM quality.

 

THE WITNESS:  Oh.  I think it's fair to sayis FM quality, yes.

 

CHAIRMAN VAN LOON:  And CD is?

 

THE WITNESS:  CD, to my ear, is a 96K Windows Media stream, 128K MP3 stream or, if you're a total purist, it's going to be the wave file ripped off the disc, which is huge, basically thousands of K because it's the 44.1 timestimes two bits per second, which is much bigger than any of those.

 

 

ARBITRATOR VON KANN:  One more on this quality issue that I had not, I don't think, really focused on until your testimony, which is that it sounds to me like the wild card in this whole process is stage number two.  I guess the webcasters can go out and upgrade, and the users can go out and upgrade, but it's almost, sounds to me, like it's damn close to pointless if all the people in the middle are way behind.  So you're, to some extent, I guess, at the mercy of what the rest of the world does or whoever -- what was the line from Butch Cassidy, "Who are those guys?"  Whoever those guys are at number two, we're all a little bit dependent on them, I guess, upgrading their systems and their facilities.

 

THE WITNESS:  Yes.

ARBITRATOR VON KANN:  It's kind of we're wasting money, in a sense, if they're still in the Dark Ages.

 

THE WITNESS:  You're definitely at the mercy of the middle.  The only ways to get around it would be something like Akamai, which is meant to stage the stuff out so there's less middle between the source of the music and the customer of the music.  And the only other thing attenuating that I can think of is that generally it's a lot -- I wouldn't say a lot for sure, but it's easier to upgrade in the middle than it is at the end points.  It's just a lot more inconvenient to spool fiber optic literally to my doorstep because I want high-speed Internet at my house than it is for Sprint to upgrade some of those lines in the middle.

But that's also just a technical answer.  There are all sorts of quite foggy economics at work, given the fact that these arrangements often don't even involve the exchange of money.  So then you might even say what's my incentive to pass buckets faster unless somebody pays me?  And as yet, the economics of that middle are still truly nascent.  So that would have to be figured out if you're to get -- I mean the term for this by the Internet engineers is quality of service, QOS. Quality of service is, "How can I take this messy middle and see to it that a consistent bandwidth is achieved so things like streams don't have to worry as much about getting interrupted.  And that's posed as like a big problem rather than as something for which we know the answer, we're rolling right along, and here we go.

 

 

CROSS EXAMINATION

 

BY MR. KATZ:

Let me start here.  Over at the beginning end, in your phase one, we've got a webcaster who needs to rip a file from a CD to a server.

 

THE WITNESS:  Yes.

 

BY MR. COHEN:

Q     And there's free software that will do that; isn't that right?

A     Free software to rip a file to a server.  It would be to rip in what format?

Q     Well, you testified about ripping in wave format; isn't that right?

 

 

A     Right.

Q     And there's free software that will do that; isn't that right?

 

A     Correct.

 

Q     A webcaster may choose to pay for software, but he doesn't need to; isn't that right?  He could use the free software.

A     Correct.

Q     But he may choose to pay something for the convenience of a more efficient piece of software; isn't that right?

A     Basically, yes, a whole efficient outfit, that's right.

Q     But webcasters didn't invent that software, did they?

 

A     Not to my knowledge.

Q     All right.  Now, the next the thing the webcaster has to do is to encode the file into one of these formats, such as MP3; isn't that right?

 

A     Correct.

Q     And that can be done with free software too; isn't that right?

A     Yes.

 

Q     And the webcasters didn't have to invent any of that technology either, did they?

 

A     I doubt it.

Q     And they don't have to pay for any of that software unless they choose to do so for their convenience; isn't that right?

 

 

A     Sure, realizing that convenience at some point is a difference in degree that becomes a difference in kind.  If you want to run a professional outfit, you can't do it all on Shareware found at random web sites.

Q     And at some point that kind of convenience is something people will pay for.

 

A     Correct.

Q     And the next step in the process, as you described it, was to compress the encoded file, and that, too, can be done with free software.

 

 

A     Yes.

 

Q     And, again, that's not technology that any webcaster needed to develop or needs to pay for; isn't that right?

 

A     I think that's right.  I don't even think when you buy the software to do it that that's a big hit on your pocketbook.

Q     And then the webcaster does have to pay his local ISP to get the information onto the network; isn't that right?

 

A     Correct.  You buy the bandwidth.

 

Q     A webcaster may choose to pay for Real server, but there's free software which will do that serving too; isn't that right?

A     You could get something like SHOUTcast, and that's a server that will serve your stuff out in MP3 format, that's right.

Q     What are the first-tier Internet companies that make up the backbone of the Internet?

 

A     The likes of MCI, Sprint, AT&T.

 

Q     And if you connect directly to one of them, you get fast intermediate carriage; isn't that right?

 

A     Well, intermediate carriage to some concentric circle, yes.  I mean some of the carriage will be fast.  But if you imagine, for instance, somebody connecting in Hawaii or in some world location, that backbone, at some point, has to go out to a rib.

 

Q     Now, moving over to the receiving end, the user needs software to undo all of these operations to reformulate the packet, music from the packet files, from the packet to decompress and to decode.  And that, too, can all be done with available free software; isn't that right?

 

A     Well, if you want to decode -- yes, that's right, to the user.  You can get free software to do this, that's right.

 

Q     Now, in fact there's a widely used, on the Internet, free operating system called LINUX; isn't that right?

 

A     I've heard of it.

Q     And all of these tools -- rippers and encoders and compressors and servers -- are all available for free operating under the LINUX operating system; isn't that right?

 

A     Well, again, it may depend on just which of the servers you're talking about.  For instance, I don't know if there exists a Windows Media server for the LINUX operating system.

Q     One might have to use the MP3 format rather than Windows Media --

 

A     Right.

Q     -- as the compression algorithm.

 

A     Right.

 

Q     But if one is -- once can do all these things using MP3; isn't that right?

A     With the -- yes, that's right, with the concomitant sacrifices that I talked about for the problems that come in the middle when you stream.

 

Q     As before, one may choose to pay for additional convenience and additional scale, but one doesn't need to if one doesn't want to.

 

A     Yes.  It's a spectrum.  It's a spectrum, although as you want to host increasing number of users, you've got to invest in better stuff, and as you have more material, et cetera.

 

Q     And so it isn't absolutely necessary for the webcaster to pay for any of this technology; isn't that right?

A     Again, I'd want to know for how many users are we talking about, for how many songs, because at some point the possible becomes the unrealistic.  But, yes, for some implementations, I could, in the course of a day, configure this machine to serve up a few streams to people and not have paid a dime to anybody above the recurring costs I already have to my Internet service provider, that's right.

Q     Do you have any experience using Apache web servers?

 

A     No.

Q     Do you know the scale and capacity of Apache web servers?

 

A     My understanding is that the relevant limits of output of streaming media are either going to be bandwidth, what you're hooking into the server to begin with, or ultimately the kind of server you have that is pushing out the media.  I think that beyond 400 or so streams you're pushing a decent computer to its limits.

 

 

Q     And Apache is the most widely use server software on the Internet; isn't that right?

A     I wouldn't know.

Q     And it is free, is it not?

 

A     Well, it depends where you buy it, but, yes, you can get it for free.

 

Q     You may choose for convenience to pay somebody to package it for you, but the software is available free.

 

A     Right, that's correct.

… [ On the analogy of streaming music to streaming video and the use of video cards to receive cable signals through your computer ]

 

 

THE WITNESS:  So as I understand your question, you say we can get nice video without any herkey jerkey motion and any of these problems with streaming to somebody's house so long as they have cable.  And then with the cable, hey, you can watch your TV, and it doesn't have interruptions if the Internet's having a bad day.  Why not just use that

and surely you could send music if you could send video with audio as well.  That's what I take your kind of question to be.

 

BY MR. KATZ:

Q     Doesn't that seem like a more efficient way to get video onto the computer screens?

A     Well, there's one big difference that I perceive in it, which is that before I, as an entrepreneur, can get my music to the ears of the listener by way of that coaxial cable that's in the house, I've got to talk to the cable company.  I've got a monopolist standing between me and the customer.  The beauty of the Internet as dicey as it is to do this in comparison is that there's no gatekeeper, I mean at least not yet.  I actually think at some point it's entirely possible there will be.  But when Time Warner is providing your regular cable service here and sending video through it at a very nice, efficient rate, if I want to be on Time Warner Cable, unless we're talking public access, I can't just be there.  I've got to like negotiate with them; I've got to cut a deal.

On the other hand, oddly enough, if Time Warner Cable is offering Time Warner Cable modem service, which is bringing broadband into that same person's house, I don't need, as the entrepreneur yet Time Warner Cable's permission to shove a stream of packets at that person, to use the bandwidth they've paid for for my stuff. So that may explain why I think you're right.  This is a much more delicate model.  And from an engineering standpoint, perhaps not the way to push streaming stuff at people given that we already have cable to the house, but the overlay of who's controlling the bottlenecks explains why webcasters are doing what they're doing.

… [ On the possibility that “buffering” really means getting your hands on a digital copy of the asset ]

 

 

BY MR. KATZ:

Q     Obvious in context, nonetheless, this is a screen shot I took of Windows Explorer on my computer this morning after watching a streaming Harry Potter trailer video.  And here in the temporary Internet files directory, in the Content.IE5 subdirectory, in the CJGZKNYJ sub-subdirectory, there was stored on my computer a Harry Potter TR480.MOV movie file,megabytes in size.  Now, would that surprise you, Professor Zittrain?

A     I'd need more data, because we see it's coming from Akamai, incidentally, so there's some splitting going on here.  Now, was the source of this a stream or is this something that was downloaded to you?

 

Q     Well, let me ask you to assume, for purposes of my last question, that this was a streaming video available on the Apple web site of a trailer of a movie.

 

A     So now I'm going off your assumption -- you're asking me to assume --

Q     Assume that.

A     -- which I can't say is the case, but I assume that Quick Time here, in order to stream a Quick Time movie, which is its counterpart to a Real Media file or a Windows Media file or an MP3 file, although this may have video involved as well as sound, I don't know, that the entire thing is sent to this directory before it goes. My guess is -- here's my best guess looking at this:  Given that it ended up in Internet Explorer's cache, this is something Internet Explorer knew how to deal with.  And that means that Internet Explorer said, "Here's a file that ends in .mov that the user has requested.  I'm going to download this file, I'm going to figure out who among my friendly peer applications knows how to handle .movs and give it to them.

So my guess is that this did not stream in the sense we're talking about.  Otherwise it would have been -- if it were to make any file at all on the hard drive, it would have been in Quick Time directory.  My guess is that this is just another hunk of file in the typical http you asked for a file, you get it, that's what web surfing is.  And it then passed it off to the Quick Time Player to play the movie so you could see Harry Potter.

 

BY MR. KATZ:

Q     Do you know if there are any webcasters doing streaming audio that way?

A     No.

 

BY MR. KATZ:

Are you familiar with BitBop?

 

A     Yes.

Q     And what is that?

A     Appears to be a service by which a client, a customer, a user gets the BitBop tuner and with it can enter in bands that the person likes, and then certain streams that are out there in the world are scanned for those bands and maybe others like it, and the user can listen to them and at times record them.

 

Q     Doesn't BitBop actually make copies of any stream files that it finds for those bands and store them on the hard drive where you can later find them in the selected directory?

A     Well, in fact, I mean I think that's the only way it works.  I don't think you can actually ask it specifically to record something.  Instead you punch in the name of a band, and then if it find streams for which the so-called metadata of the stream indicates that it's matching that band, it will start putting that onto the hard drive. Now, to my knowledge, this isn't for any old stream; this is just for Real streams and maybe for MP3 streams, but I think for Real streams is what

it's mostly going after.

 

From what I understand, the way BitBop does what it does is because it has access to a little bit of Real's secret sauce, which is to say there's something called a software development kit.  Remember how I was saying how you might be hearing Real streams, but it doesn't look like you're using the Real Player.  It's the Real engine underneath.  The

way that those third parties, and I think BitBop is one of them, gets that engine is through a deal with Real.  And there's a contract involved, and the contract says --

 

ARBITRATOR VON KANN:  The Real deal?

THE WITNESS:  The Real deal.  And the Real deal is that you will only behave -- you'll only use these tools for good and not for evil sort of thing. So to get to your question of why is it that you can't type in a track name, my surmise -- and I want to be sure it's just a surmise -- but my surmise is that BitBop is trying to skate a certain line.  They make it too easy to find these streams and save them.  They'll get in big trouble, with Real first in line to take a shot at them.  Because Real would say, "This is an abuse of our software development kit.  This is an abuse of our secret sauce."

So I think that's why BitBop seems so oddly functional.  It can do some things but not others, and I don't think there's any technical reason why it does one versus the other so long as it already has its mitts on the software development kit.  I think it has other reasons that are non-technical for skating that line.

So I think in a similar vein as that, BitBop will not record to disk in any better quality thankilobits.  Even if the stream you're tuned into by all rights ought to be larger.  I don't know if it either down samples it or simply refuses to offer that up.  To my knowledge, the only stuff that ends up on your hard disk, thanks to BitBop, is at 56 kilobits or less.  And that's because, again, I think for non-technical reasons they're trying to skate a certain line.

BY MR. KATZ:

Q     Are you familiar with Streamripper?

 

A     Yes.

 

Q     Now what does that do?

 

A     Streamripper appears to be both -- primarily a plug-in to WinAmp.  Remember WinAmp is a player that doesn't play Real streams, it doesn't play Windows Media streams, it just plays these MP3 streams as streams go.  And Streamripper will allow the user to record that stream to disk as it comes in as an MP3 file.  I think the Streamripper program is still labeled as being in beta, just as BitBop's tuner is labeled as being either experimental or a sample or

something or a pilot.  All of this stuff, I think, is labeled that way, again, possibly for non-technical reasons.  But that's, to my knowledge, what Streamripper does.

Q     Are you familiar with Total Recorder?

A     Yes.

Q     And what does that one do?

A     Total Recorder is something that's designed to pretend that it's a sound card.  It pretends it's your speakers or on the way to your speakers, when in fact it's busily digitizing or taking that digital stream and recording it to disk.  It's what I've heard referred to as a dumb buffer.  It just basically -- if sound comes its way, it puts it onto the hard drive.

Q     Any sounds that you get at all, in any format, in any stream, you can turn into a file by using Total Recorder.

A     Well, Total Recorder -- yes, given where it stands in the stream of things, if your computer beeps because it's upset about something else while you're listening to the stream, that beep gets onto it too.  I mean it is basically a digital microphone just held to your computer speaker.

 

Q     Let's assume for the moment that there is [a proxy server in Harvard’s network].  Proxy servers are common in campus and business networks; isn't that right?

 

A     The sorts of proxy servers that can host static files, yes, those are common.

 

Q     And the point of a proxy server is that if a number of users connected to the one ISP or on the one campus or office network, one, access the same file.

A     Right.

 

Q     Rather than have that file stream over the Internet through that tube cloud over and over and over again, the whole file will be captured at a central server by that ISP or on the network.  And then the user will only have to go that far to get it; isn't that right?

 

A     But now be very careful about the use of the word "stream" there.  I mean the typical proxy server is not dealing with streams.  It's dealing with files, with stuff that you -- everybody in your chain, from the file server, not the webcaster, to the user expects there's a file that's going from one place to another.  So it's typically going to be something like a banner ad for a page that has even been marked by the creator as something which is suitable for caching, so something that might not even be updated very much.

 

So, for instance, an online manual that never gets updated but for which inexplicably there's high demand, you could see the manual document being cached at a so-called proxy server and then made available much more easily for everybody concerned to the downstream user.  That's different from streaming, though.

Q     One can stream an MP3 format; isn't that right?

A     Yes.

Q     And if one streams an MP3 format, the MP3 file will be stored on a proxy server; isn't that right?

A     If it is so-called http streaming, the MP3 file is like any other file that gets transferred through hyptertext transfer protocol, and one might choose to put it that way.

Q     Now, for example, all users on AOL connect through proxy servers; isn't that right?

A     I don't know.

 

Q     Well, if that's right and if lots of AOL users want to listen to the same audio file being streamed in an http MP3 format, that whole audio file is going to get stored on those AOL servers; isn't that right?

A     If it is simply a file ending in .mp3, that's the destination of a link on a page like anywhere else, a proxy server could choose to cache it like anything else.  But, again, generally, at network practice, supposing that the metadata, the information about the file that is sort of prefatory to the file, says, "Hi.  Hey, feel free to cache me.  Don't worry about checking in with me every time you want the file.  It will help me too."

 

 

Q     I want to ask you about one footnote in your testimony, and that is footnote on page of your prepared statement.  And as you note in that footnote, it would be possible for a webcaster to stream directly from physical CDs using the equivalent of live encoding; isn't that right?

A     Right.

Q     Now, a webcaster may choose to go through the encoding process, copying the file to the hard drive for his convenience, but it could be done directly from the CD; isn't that right?

A     Well, yes.  It would probably be more expensive.  It wouldn't just be more convenient to do it; it would be less expensive as well.

 

Q     So there's a cost savings for the webcaster in doing free encoding; isn't that right?

 

A     A cost savings compared against a physical Sony jukebox of 200 CDs that, yes, grinds its way around.

 

Q     I've got one more exhibit to show you, and this one will be numbered as RIAA Exhibit Number 165 DPX.

Q     You'll notice at the top of the first page it says, "Jonathan Zittrain, Request three," and at the bottom there is a marking, "Restricted," and then numbering which would be consistent with that; isn't that right?

 

A     That's right.

Q     You gave some testimony in response to questions about the cost structure faced by webcasters, and you indicated around 2:23 that information on the cost structures of bandwidth is not so easy to get but that you did get information from a survey; isn't that right? Is this the study you were referring to?

 

A     Yes, this is the one I had in mind.

Q     And in your view, is this as good information as you've seen with respect to costs for streaming?

A     Yes.  It certainly is precise as I've seen.

 

BY MR. KATZ:

Q     Now, it indicates on the page with the Bates numberon it, which I believe is pageof the study, at the bottom of the page under their headlines, that they found in their survey that live streaming prices range from $20 per stream hour to 20 cents per stream hour; isn't that right?

 

 

A     Yes.

Q     A remarkably wide variation; isn't that right?

A     Yes.

Q     And then turning over to the next page, it indicates in the second paragraph after the bullet points that most streamers seem to pay too much.  A whoppingpercent of respondents are paying higher prices than the standard industry service provider prices that we've been able to obtain; isn't that right?

A     Yes, that's what it says.

Q     Which would be a surprising result, isn't it?

A     Yes.  I mean I'd want to be careful to figure out what too much means.  I mean too much as against an average or too much because they're just not bargaining well, I don't know.  But I mean their claim is that a whoppingpercent of respondents are paying higher prices than the standard industry service provider prices that they were able to obtain.

 

 

Q     Now, if you turn over to page 30, which has the Bates numberon it –

Q     Here on the last page of the study, before the appendix, it says, "Our best advice:  negotiate.  That's the road to fair pricing;" isn't that right?

 

A     That's what it says.

 

Q     And, apparently, this study concluded that there were consumers of streaming services that really weren't making the effort to negotiate to get their costs down; isn't that right?

 

A     Or put more carefully, that the most available of trying to get out of a bad situation is to negotiate.  There's no guarantee that that too would succeed, which is to say it doesn't mean that you've been negotiating so poorly you need a report to tell you, "By the way, you shouldn't pay sticker price for a car."  But it may be all you've got.

Q     That's all I've got.  Thank you, Professor.

A     Thank you.

 

 

 

REDIRECT EXAMINATION

Q     Do you recall that you were asked about various free software tools that someone might use in connection with the streaming of -- in an MP3 format?

 

A     Yes.  In order to stream, you mean; in order to be the webcaster.

Q     Correct.

A     Yes.

 

Q     How would you compare, in terms of both quality of sound and in terms of security of the format, the MP3 format with the Real Audio and Windows Media formats?

 

A     I think there's a big difference.  That's why Real and Windows Media have a business despite the existence of the more common, in the first instance, MP3 formats in streaming.  As I said in my direct, there's lots of extra features you get as a webcaster that result in a better experience to the person downstream that you get by going with the non-MP3 streamers.  And that also includes -- I mean I've been talking about quality so far, but it also includes the ability to say something like, "This stream is not to be copied," and to rest assured that for most users it's not going to be copied, even if they want to.  Now even MP3 streaming may not be obvious to a user how to do it, you've got to get the right plug-in for WinAmp, but it's that much harder to do with Real or Windows Media.

 

Q     And is it the case that the buffer data that we've been talking about is held in the RAM type of memory?

A     Yes.  These are RAM buffers that we're talking about.

 

Q     And, in contrast, when a user obtains a file through the Napster service, what type of memory is that file being stored?

 

A     If you obtain a file through Napster, at the end of the day it's on your hard drive.  When you turn off the computer it's there.  That's why when you turn it back on it's still there.  Should it only have gone to RAM, not only would you have no obvious way of how to get to it, but it would be quite transient from one session to the next.

Q     Okay.  And are you aware of any way to change the size of the buffer in Real Audio and Windows Media?

 

A     No, I don't know of any way to do it.  It may naturally happen as I answer questions designed for regular people, like, "How fast is your connection?"  "56K."  That may impact what Real then chooses the Player to set the buffer.  But, no, I know of way to just go in and fill in a field that says, "This is the buffer size I want."

 

Q     Okay.  And if you're not aware of how to do that, do you think the average user is aware of how to do that?

A     I doubt the average user is aware of how to do this.

Q     You were asked some questions about BitBop.  Do you know whether the files that are obtained through the use of BitBop can be easily transferred off of one's computer?

A     I was unable to do it.  I played with it for a while.  BitBop, when you set this recorder to on, files end up on your hard drive along the lines of 56K or less quality, and then you say, "Well, 56K what?  What is it?  Is it Windows Media?  Is it what?"  It seems to be something that's meant to play in the Real Player but in fact is an MP3 file.  This is a square peg in a round hole, but it's not your normal MP3 file, because if you try to play it in any other player, it doesn't work, any other normal MP3 player like WinAmp.  And, further, if you try to play it in another Real Player, other than the one on your machine, it doesn't work. And I tried doing the most obvious things of setting the e-mail address with which I registered the Real Player and BitBop to the same from one machine to the next, and the file still refused to play.  And I tried just changing the file extension to tell it, "You're not an MX3, you're an MP3," and that had no effect either.  MX3 does not appear to be anybody's format.  The only format it appears to be is something BitBop came up with for the purpose of making those recorded files tethered, as you would say, to the machine, and I don't know how to crack it.  I can't say it can't be cracked, but I was not able, in the time I spent on it, to do it.

 

Q     Can you suggest any reasons why the types of stream capturing applications that you were asked about would not be used very much by people who were looking to make copies of music from the Internet?

 

A     Well, I can think of a few reasons.  One is if I want to get copies of music off the Internet that I can keep on my hard drive, I've got Napster and, more recently, its progeny and siblings.  I've got Bear Share and Morpheus and Nuttela and all of those things for which that's the purpose.  And, presumably, the source of those files floating around, legal or illegal, are CDs from which they were ripped by the users who are then sharing them.  To get it off a stream is not nearly as good from the point of view of somebody wanting to keep the file, because for one thing you run the risk of if it's that dumb buffer, Total Recorder, to the extent that the stream has any issues with it or even less quality because of packet loss, that less quality ends up on your drive.  So all the efficiency of the stream, which is I can hear it now, isn't what you want.  When you want the music, you don't want the music so much now as forever, and you're willing to wait a little bit longer than now to get it really forever.

The other thing is that some of these other programs, like BitBop, for example, lower the rate at which you can capture the stream.  And even if there weren't that clamp on it -- BitBop, again, is I think at 56K -- for Streamripper most of the streams available for ripping out in the world, thanks to the cost structure on the webcaster, are not CD-quality streams.  So even if there's a perfectly clear day in that middle of the Internet cloud, the stream you'll ultimately end up with on your hard drive is one that is of lesser quality.

 

 

RECROSS EXAMINATION

 

BY MR. KATZ:

Q     Back in your MacIntosh days, did you ever use RAM doubler?

A     Yes.

 

Q     There are utilities which will enable hard drive space to be used instead of RAM; isn't that right?

 

A     Sure.  So-called virtual memory is just that.  It's hard drive space masquerading as RAM.

 

 

Q     So something intended to be held in a RAM buffer might end up being cached to a hard drive instead; isn't that right?

A     Not in the sense of producing the kind of list of files that your demonstrative of the -- I don't even know where it went -- but of that directory of files that included the Harry Potter stuff.  I mean that itself -- here it is -- the CJGZKNYJ directory.  I mean this thing to me is somewhat obscure to the regular user, I mean not even on their radar.  If you use something like RAM doubler, which I, just to be entirely clear, used for about ten minutes before turning it off, to have hard drive space used as RAM, there's just fragments of the hard drive being used as RAM that aren't even accessible in this format, let alone sort of just double click and you can hear the music that's in RAM.

Q     The typical audience for webcaster isn't the typical user, is it?

Q     Finally, when you were trying to transfer those BitBop files, did you try Total Recorder?

 

A     Well, that wouldn't -- no, I didn't try to Total Recorder, because that wouldn't be transferring files.

Q     But it would move that audio to another computer wouldn't it?

 

A     It would be -- yes, it would.  It would be unpacking the rumpled suit, repacking it, and unpacking it again.  There would be more rumples.  But, yes, ultimately, you'd end up with something that looked like a suit, more or less.