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Let's take the null hypothesis that these incentives push all video streaming to Apple+. The total bandwidth hasn't changed, all that's happened is that is it's

Let's take the null hypothesis that these incentives push all video streaming to Apple+. The total bandwidth hasn't changed, all that's happened is that is it's only streamed over Apple+ now. How does this help with their spectrum constraints?

mrWiz 3y ago
Do you think that /all/ streaming would be pushed to Apple+? What if some people simply reduced the amount they streamed over the cell link?
toast0 3y ago
T-Mobile USA has a pretty user friendly version of this on many/most of its plans. If a music streaming service participates to label its traffic, that data is zero rated for eligible users. If a video streaming service participates to label its traffic and limit bandwidth (advertising says 480p, but I think it's really a bitrate cap), then data is zero rated for eligible users. On plans with a high speed data cap, users can opt out of the bandwidth limiting and get potentially higher quality streaming (depending on network conditions) but the data usage will be charged against the cap. There's no charge for providers to participate. I don't know how zero-rating music streaming helps with spectrum; that's probably more of an inducement to use data, but music streaming is low bandwidth, and maybe there's some magic to accumulate those packets and send as a batch rather than one at a time and therefore save some framing bandwidth. For video it's clearly a bandwidth thing. If you can reduce to the target, that's good for their spectrum management, so you get a carrot. Also, it encourages bandwidth sensitive streaming (which many services were already doing), so that if the conditions are poor for a particular user/cell, video bandwidth will be responsive and reduce automatically.
- vel0city 3y ago
  So how do I sign up to get my home media server added to be zero-rated?
  - toast0 3y ago
    T-mobile says: "If you are a streaming service provider click here[1], send us an email and we'll get back to you to begin the process. T-Mobile will review all submissions to ensure identification of video stream and technical requirements, including optimization for mobile viewing." They do have a requirement that "Only lawful and licensed video content is eligible for the offering" And that you be capable of making the stream identifiable as video content and do adaptive bitrate streaming (target of 1.5 Mbps) The only public documentation for service providers I found was in the consumer faq [2] under "I’m a streaming service provider – how do I learn more?" It's quite probable that they won't engage with a home media server, because you're operating under fair use rather than an explicit license, or because there's too many individual home media servers and some home media servers serve media that's unlicensed and also not within the scope of fair user. But it doesn't hurt to ask and see what you get back. Alternately, a paper from 2016 [3], suggests you could make your content available in a form that appears to be one of the supported services, and likely get mischaracterized as that service and have your data zero-rated as a result. Not sure if anyone is still running video over http in 2016, but it's worth a try. It should be apparent if it works, as when it does, T-Mobile will limit streaming bandwidth to 1.5 Mbps. [1] bingeon@t-mobile.com [2] https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on [3] http://david.choffnes.com/pubs/bingeon_sigcomm16.pdf http://david.choffnes.com/pubs/bingeon_sigcomm16.pdf
- salawat 3y ago
  So are you trying to sell the ability to graph who has seen what? Because that's essentially what that scheme does. No more dumb pipes, you're handing over tons of business recod based metadata out to ISP's to inevitably monetize, which, oh, coincidentally, waives any expectation of privacy legally speaking between the endpoints given our current judicial attitude toward Third Party Doctrine.
  - toast0 3y ago
    No. While it's certainly easiest to identify video streaming if the content is served in the clear, it's also possible to mark streams as video without making the content (or its identifiers) available. If everything is limited to 1.5 Mbps, you're just letting the carrier know who is watching something; but it's not hard to guess that someone is watching something based on the origin of traffic and other signs: if you download a short burst of data from Netflix CDN, you're probably running the fast.com speed test; if it's about 40 minutes of sustained data transfer, you probably watched a TV episode, if it's more like 2 hours, it was likely a movie, etc. There's a benefit to the video providers, the carrier, and users, if this is done in a reasonable way. And I think T-Mobile's approach is the most reasonable way I've seen (at least from what's been said publicly)

mrWiz 3y ago

Do you think that /all/ streaming would be pushed to Apple+? What if some people simply reduced the amount they streamed over the cell link?

toast0 3y ago

T-Mobile USA has a pretty user friendly version of this on many/most of its plans. If a music streaming service participates to label its traffic, that data is zero rated for eligible users. If a video streaming service participates to label its traffic and limit bandwidth (advertising says 480p, but I think it's really a bitrate cap), then data is zero rated for eligible users. On plans with a high speed data cap, users can opt out of the bandwidth limiting and get potentially higher quality streaming (depending on network conditions) but the data usage will be charged against the cap. There's no charge for providers to participate. I don't know how zero-rating music streaming helps with spectrum; that's probably more of an inducement to use data, but music streaming is low bandwidth, and maybe there's some magic to accumulate those packets and send as a batch rather than one at a time and therefore save some framing bandwidth. For video it's clearly a bandwidth thing. If you can reduce to the target, that's good for their spectrum management, so you get a carrot. Also, it encourages bandwidth sensitive streaming (which many services were already doing), so that if the conditions are poor for a particular user/cell, video bandwidth will be responsive and reduce automatically.

vel0city 3y ago
So how do I sign up to get my home media server added to be zero-rated?
- toast0 3y ago
  T-mobile says: "If you are a streaming service provider click here[1], send us an email and we'll get back to you to begin the process. T-Mobile will review all submissions to ensure identification of video stream and technical requirements, including optimization for mobile viewing." They do have a requirement that "Only lawful and licensed video content is eligible for the offering" And that you be capable of making the stream identifiable as video content and do adaptive bitrate streaming (target of 1.5 Mbps) The only public documentation for service providers I found was in the consumer faq [2] under "I’m a streaming service provider – how do I learn more?" It's quite probable that they won't engage with a home media server, because you're operating under fair use rather than an explicit license, or because there's too many individual home media servers and some home media servers serve media that's unlicensed and also not within the scope of fair user. But it doesn't hurt to ask and see what you get back. Alternately, a paper from 2016 [3], suggests you could make your content available in a form that appears to be one of the supported services, and likely get mischaracterized as that service and have your data zero-rated as a result. Not sure if anyone is still running video over http in 2016, but it's worth a try. It should be apparent if it works, as when it does, T-Mobile will limit streaming bandwidth to 1.5 Mbps. [1] bingeon@t-mobile.com [2] https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on [3] http://david.choffnes.com/pubs/bingeon_sigcomm16.pdf http://david.choffnes.com/pubs/bingeon_sigcomm16.pdf
salawat 3y ago
So are you trying to sell the ability to graph who has seen what? Because that's essentially what that scheme does. No more dumb pipes, you're handing over tons of business recod based metadata out to ISP's to inevitably monetize, which, oh, coincidentally, waives any expectation of privacy legally speaking between the endpoints given our current judicial attitude toward Third Party Doctrine.
- toast0 3y ago
  No. While it's certainly easiest to identify video streaming if the content is served in the clear, it's also possible to mark streams as video without making the content (or its identifiers) available. If everything is limited to 1.5 Mbps, you're just letting the carrier know who is watching something; but it's not hard to guess that someone is watching something based on the origin of traffic and other signs: if you download a short burst of data from Netflix CDN, you're probably running the fast.com speed test; if it's about 40 minutes of sustained data transfer, you probably watched a TV episode, if it's more like 2 hours, it was likely a movie, etc. There's a benefit to the video providers, the carrier, and users, if this is done in a reasonable way. And I think T-Mobile's approach is the most reasonable way I've seen (at least from what's been said publicly)