HTTP, the Once And Future King

Not that I’m in the loop or anything, but NBC and Fox’s parent companies have banded together to create an on-demand television show streaming video site. They called it Hulu.com, (which just goes to show you that all the good domain names are already taken.)
It’s a YouTube competitor with one thing going for it: Legal viewings of NBC and Fox shows. And that may be grand and glorious, but I remember back in the 1990s when every record label put out a separate music download service – and were trumped by iTunes which sold records from all the labels. But I digress.
The point is, if even the major networks are saying that it’s time to start shifting product from the television to the Internet, it means there is a significant trend shift.
And indeed, looking at traffic patterns, there certainly have been. Previously, Peer-to-Peer traffic was considered the number one way that files got moved around on the Internet. But lately, P2P’s position as Internet Bandwidth top dog has been replaced by the HTTP protocol – streaming video likely has quite a bit to do with that shift.
There’s an article in Ars Technica which shows that HTTP traffic takes up 46% of the Internet – at least from broadband users, while P2P takes up merely 37%, putting it in second place.
This is problematic from a network performance standpoint. Peer to peer traffic does indeed have its place – BitTorrent transfers of Linux CDs and large file versions of Microsoft patches come to mind. But it is easier to identify and not usually as work-critical to segregate that traffic. With the video traffic from YouTube coming in over HTTP, you can’t just block off HTTP. You need to be able to figure out the type of data in the payload – not just the protocol of the traffic.
Now, there are business applications of YouTube (we use it quite a bit in our marketing department) and other such bandwidth-heavy hogs, and an outright ban would be counterproductive. So how do you have your YouTube viral marketing campaigns while still maintaining that the business data goes through in a timely manner? The answer is probably to put a QoS policy in place for streaming video, but in order to implement it, you need to have visibility into your data.