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Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target?
snydeq writes "Responding to legal pressure over its throttling of P2P traffic and other dubious practices, Comcast says it will now punish the most abusive users rather than particular applications. Yet its pilot tests in Pennsylvania and Virgina, which would 'delay traffic for the heaviest users of Internet data without targeting specific software applications,' raise greater concerns over net neutrality, ones that belie a potential preemptive strike against the cable company's chief future competition: streaming video. 'Despite the industry's constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video,' writes Mehan Jayasuriya at Public Knowledge. 'Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they're effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it.'"
It seems that promising too much in order to hook new users and then hitting the heaviest users (instead of fulfilling the promise)is a very valid business strategy lately.
... it's pro-retarded.
"You can use your car for anything you want... as long as you don't use it to go to work, or drive long distances. That's rough on the engine."
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I'd be delighted to see streaming video killed.
We'd go back to "download the video to the client's hard drive, and play it back." Was that really such a bad thing?
Requiring a web-based client to stream content hosted on an external server, is, at the root of it, a form of DRM. When the server goes away (or deletes the link to it), the content becomes unplayable. This applies whether you're talking about YouTube's embedded flash player, or the hoops through which Windows users have to jump in order to save .wmv clips from TV news sites, etc.
And streaming is inefficient. You not only require a continuous throughput at a reasonably high bitrate, but after you've finished downloading your 20 megabytes of content for that 2-minute video clip, your client does you the favor of immediately deleting it. So the next time you want to watch the video, you get the joy of re-downloading it. WTF? In an age of $200 terabyte hard drives, that's ridiculous.
So bring on the death of streaming video, and let's get back to the good old days of File->SaveAs .mpg, .flv, .avi, .mp4, and a few minutes later, you can play the locally-stored content to your heart's content. Forever.
Like I said, cable companies... be careful what you ask for.
They want to control what we access, and when. The motive, of course, is money. But the collateral damage is our freedom.
Netflix not working for ya, huh? Oh, hey, good thing Comcast offers stutter-free On-Demand videos!
What's that? You didn't want to use Comcast's on-demand, because it's more expensive and has a crappy selection?
Huh. Too bad, I guess.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow.
How does one abuse an "unlimited" internet plan?
"[..]the most abusive users [...]"
since when is USING a flat rate abuse? Goddammit, sell your bandwidth as "10GB per month" and shut up.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.