On July 1, 2012 television, movie, music businesses, as well as major Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in the US (including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable) started implementing a voluntary Copyright Alert System, often referred to as the “6-strikes rule” to reduce online copyright infringement in the US.  The agreement seeks to create balance between rights to privacy as well as rights to content, an argument which had put the CSPs in the middle.

Previous to this agreement, using the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a content holder would typically go to a CSP and request the identity of a suspected infringer, and then notify them directly.  This had lead to a large number of blanket lawsuits and a large amount of work for the CSP to lookup who had a specific IP address at some time, which is why the Copyright Alert System was created.

So how does the identification of suspected copyright infringement occur? Is your ISP snooping on you? In a nutshell:  the detection is done by a 3^rd party, not by your ISP and it is done off the network.  To answer this question more thoroughly, let’s first look at how that information is collected, by examining how one of the most popular P2P filesharing networks works – BitTorrent.

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One of the big news stories of the weeks seems to be the fact that AT&T could potentially charge customers for the ability to use Apple’s FaceTime video calling feature over their cellular network.

This will be interesting from a Net Neutrality perspective. The FCC’s rules say that mobile carriers can’t block access to lawful websites and may not block applications that compete with their own video or voice telephony services. AT&T is not talking about blocking though. The rules also say: No unreasonable discrimination such as to favour one’s own application offerings over competitive offerings. The FCC acknowledged that some discrimination is beneficial. They also noted that paid prioritization is likely to be unreasonable, but will be subject to case-specific review, however this rule does not apply to mobile providers.

To date, iPhones, iPads, iPods, and Macs have had to rely on Wi-fi in order to connect a call, but with the scheduled release of iOS 6 coming this fall that is expected to change…as long as your carrier allows it.  

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Take a trip around The Cable Show in Boston last week and it’s hard to imagine that just three years ago nobody would have had a tablet in their hands. Fast forward to 2012 and virtually every cable content provider and Multiple System Operator (MSO) was demoing some kind of tablet application that offers subscribers the ability to consume Real-Time Entertainment on their mobile devices. 

It should really come as no surprise that the cable industry is taking mobile devices seriously, because as reported in our 1H 2012 Global Internet Phenomena Report, 16% of all Real-Time Entertainment traffic on fixed access networks in North America is now consumed on mobile devices.

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Last week’s Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) show was hosted in the lively city of New Orleans and pulled together over 40,000 attendees and more than 1,000 exhibitors from all corners of the globe to discuss issues facing the mobile industry.  As a show opener, a local jazz quartet marched out to center stage and delighted the applauding audience with a snappy tune.  Some could argue that this brief music interlude captured the peak of show excitement, as some reporters have been commenting on how quiet this year’s event was.

 
Although it may seem to have been a quieter show, Sandvine believes that there is an underground current of noise that everyone is starting to listen to much more closely. In our Global Internet Phenomena Report: 1H 2012, we reported that streaming audio now accounts for over 6% of total mobile traffic in some regions of the globe and that YouTube is the largest source of mobile video traffic in every region examined, accounting for as much as 25% of network data.  How many people are listening to music through Pandora on your network?  If subscribers are starting to use mobile devices as a radio, it won’t be long before they use mobile devices as their TV.

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