
Spotify Starts Shutting Down Its Massive P2P Network - asaddhamani
http://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-massive-p2p-network-140416/
======
DonHopkins
When I worked for TomTom, I developed and tested a system for distributing
maps via BitTorrent.

I first looked at Red Swoosh and its Firefox extension, FoxTorrent. It would
have been ideal, since we using the xulrunner platform for TomTom Home, but
Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, and it vanished without a trace. [1] [2] [3] [4]

TomTom's Maps are perfect for BitTorrent distribution, because they're large
(1 Gig and growing) and lots of people in the same region need to download the
same map at the same time. And it would have been a wonderful legal and
practical example of a legitimate use of BitTorrent to point to when companies
like Comcast try tricks like blocking BitTorrent traffic.

I visited BitTorrent in San Francisco, and discussed it with Bram Cohen. Their
technology seemed ideal for our purposes (it worked a bit like Red Swoosh /
FoxTorrent), and they quoted me a price per gigabyte to distribute content
over their BitTorrent DNA network, which was a hell of a lot cheaper than we
were paying to Akamai (this was before the made BitTorrent DNA distribution
free).

A couple days after that meeting, I stopped by the Akamai booth at the Game
Developer Conference in San Francisco, and asked them what their prices were
for using the Red Swoosh technology they'd recently acquired. Travis Kalanick,
the founder of Red Swoosh, gladly told me about his technology and answered my
technical questions. (I had previously been looking at Red Swoosh and
FoxTorrent, before it was acquired by Akamai, and it would have been easy to
integrate with our xulrunner based product, TomTom Home).

Akamai's sales people refused to quote me a price, despite repeated requests,
so I told them the price BitTorrent quoted me, and told them we were ready to
start testing as soon as possible, and asked again if they could at least give
me a ballpark estimate of how much they would charge for distributing content
via Red Swoosh, and when we could start testing. They muttered something about
not having come up with a pricing model yet, but that I could get into their
beta program, whenever that started, which they also would not state.

I was somewhat skeptical about Akamai's support for Red Swoosh, dedication to
P2P technologies, and motivations for acquiring Red Swoosh, since P2P
technologies are such a huge threat to their business model. It was getting a
lot of attention before they acquired it. I was afraid that they might have
just acqui-hired Red Swoosh simply to sweep it under the rug so they didn't
have to compete with it. And I was afraid that if and when they finally
figured out how to charge for it, it might not be such a great deal after all.

So I went back to Amsterdam, integrated BitTorrent DNA into TomTom Home (the
desktop app for managing content and downloading maps on your TomTom device,
like iTunes for TomToms instead of iPods, which happened to be implemented on
xulrunner (the Mozilla "platform" that Firefox and TomTom Home are build on
top of -- which Mozilla eventually lost interest in supporting as a third
party application development platform).

It was easy to integrate BitTorrent DNA into TomTom Home, it worked well, and
I performed a successful beta test with a bunch of users across the world, to
measure how well it worked, how long it took, and how much it would save.

Then I did an analysis of the Akamai logs to figure out how much money we were
spending on customers downloading maps, how long it took, where they were
downloading them from, and how much money BitTorrent DNA would save us.

For example, Australia would have really benefited, because their connection
to the outside world and Akamai coverage was terrible, but their internal
connection speed and bandwidth was excellent, and everybody in Australia wants
the Australia map, of course.

It turned out that BitTorrent would save TomTom about a million euros the
first year, and more each year, since TomTom was distributing larger and
larger maps, more frequently by subscription, and of course they hoped to get
more customers over time. (See:
[http://www.sadtrombone.com](http://www.sadtrombone.com) ...)

But then all of a sudden, out of the blue, Akamai unilaterally lowered the
prices they were charging TomTom, saving us a lot of money immediately,
presumably to prevent us from switching to BitTorrent (after I had made a bit
of a scene at Akamai's GDC booth, in front Travis Kalanick and their sales
people, about just having talked Bran Cohen and acquired a quote and beta
testing agreement from BitTorrent, and insisted that Akamai tell me what their
prices were and when we could start testing -- that may have motivated them to
unilaterally lower their prices).

So in the end, TomTom middle management decided to can the BitTorrent project,
in spite of the fact that it was the TomTom founder Pieter Geelen's idea in
the first place, and he'd been micromanaging the entire project and user
interface all along, to make sure it would not just save us money, but also
not have a negative impact on usability or customer perception.

There are some important non-technical issues to deal with that Pieter wanted
to get right: making it easy to use, setting the defaults right, explaining
what it is, getting consent from customers to use their upload bandwidth
(since they may have to pay for it, have an upload cap, or want to use it for
other _ahem_ purposes), and clearly explaining what benefits customers get
from it (not leaving the impression that it's just to benefit TomTom
financially, at the expense of the customer), and revealing the possible costs
and risks.

We put a lot of effort into that part of it, and I don't think it was going to
be a problem. It seems to have worked out all right for WoW and Spotify (in
retrospect, up to now).

It was disappointing that TomTom didn't use BitTorrent, but I can certainly
understand Akamai's mortal fear of it, and I'm still skeptical that Akamai may
have bought it just to sweep it under the rug so they didn't have to compete
with it, and didn't really mean to roll it out practically and economically,
and develop it to its full potential.

Years later, Akamai now has something called "Akamai NetSession", that may or
may not be related to Red Swoosh -- I don't know much about it or how much it
costs. Can anyone else comment on that, please? [5]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedSwoosh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedSwoosh)

[2]
[http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2007/press_0...](http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2007/press_041207.html)

[3] [http://gigaom.com/2008/05/03/whatever-happened-to-red-
swoosh...](http://gigaom.com/2008/05/03/whatever-happened-to-red-swoosh/)

[4] [http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/12/payday-for-red-
swoosh-15-mi...](http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/12/payday-for-red-
swoosh-15-million-from-akamai/)

[5] [http://www.akamai.com/client](http://www.akamai.com/client)

~~~
domlebo70
Great post.

------
aaronbrethorst
At no point does the article attempt to address the question of 'why', which
is disappointing.

edit: The article also says

    
    
        P2P has been central to Spotify’s success for a
        variety of reasons. For one, it allowed the
        service to scale up quickly without having to
        invest heavily in servers and bandwidth. This
        must have saved the company millions of dollars
        per year.
    

So perhaps bandwidth and hardware are both getting cheaper. Ok, but they still
don't have a cost of zero, nor is it free to rearchitect your product. Hence
my confusion.

edit 2: Thanks to tazjin for the clarification.

~~~
birken
> “We’re now at a stage where we can power music delivery through our growing
> number of servers and ensure our users continue to receive a best-in-class
> service,” Bonny says.

Makes sense to me. The bigger you get, the cheaper bandwidth becomes because
of bulk deals. At this point maintaining the p2p network and all of the
associated code and problems is probably more expensive than just serving the
files themselves.

~~~
psykovsky
As I refused to use skype because of the p2p bullshit, I will also not use
Spotify when I have to pay for it with my atention or my money in addition to
my bandwidth.

~~~
matthewmacleod
I must admit, I don't quite understand this.

I'd wager that the only reason Spotify was able to offer a service in the
early days at all was because it leveraged listener's bandwidth. Even if it
could, using P2P will have directly reduced the costs/number of adverts that
would otherwise have been required. That's a perfectly reasonable tradeoff,
and I guess that the vast majority of users would rather have a monetarily
cheaper service.

~~~
antocv
Spotify are pirates, their initial library load came from DC++ and
thepiratebay.se

Hypocrites.

~~~
ubercow13
Isn't that true of multiple music services? Napster? What's the problem with
that

------
driverdan
Good. Their implementation was awful. There was no way to turn it off or
restrict bandwidth. I had to actively block it at my firewall to prevent it
from interfering with other network activity.

~~~
Rodeoclash
This. For a week I was wondering why I was getting 300+ pings to city local
Team Fortress 2 servers, and in the same week why I hit 50% of my allocated
traffic for the month (Australia). The cause? Spotify continuously streaming
data.

------
rinon
I think more important than the P2P network shutting down is how it allowed
Spotify to get up and running with relatively low up-front investment. What
they do after this is, ultimately, unimportant and not terribly interesting.

~~~
marshray
Good point, but I think it is interesting to wonder why P2P so rarely succeeds
at delivering the huge efficiency that's suggested by theory.

As their service grows, Spotify should be liking P2P _superlinearly more_.
Since they and other services are apparently not, it something is wrong with
my conception of the economics of the internet.

~~~
rinon
Unless there are hidden costs to maintaining a P2P architecture. Support costs
may grow superlinearly, or the company might decide they want (or need) more
central control.

~~~
DonHopkins
Or a company might decide they want big government contracts in exchange for
ditching P2P for a more centralized surveillance system.

------
smileysteve
I think that this is unfortunate because it puts Spotify in a Netflix
position. Netflix can reduce it's peering burdens if it adopts some of the
spotify concept of p2p (and it's actually cheaper for isps too)

~~~
matthewmacleod
Hmm. The "Netflix problem" is definitely an issue I hadn't considered.

However, I suspect that continuing to use P2P wouldn't actually result in
reduced costs in practice. P2P is complex, and getting a reliable streaming
service out of it is obviously a more difficult technical issue that "steaming
some bits from a server."

Indeed, I'd expect that with suitable peering and Netflix-style caching
servers within ISP networks, it wouldn't even save ISPs money.

~~~
smileysteve
The point isn't to necessarily to save isps money. It's to not allow them to
charge netflix for peering agreements (esp when they don't accept the netflix
caching boxes)

