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Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
nicholasjay writes "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent."
Oh it definately will. But it will have nothing to do with bandwidth costs, upstream this or downstream that. It won't be an issue for ISP's, or have anything to do with network stablity, neutrality, or anything else you'd normally expect.
Netflix is part of an inter-communal group of corporations with "Net" in their name. NetZero. NetPlus. To name a few. Netscape is their browser of choice, and for very obvious reasons. If any of you have ever used Netscape, you know that it likes to freeze and crash, very often. However, it's not actually freezing and it's not actually crashing. It's only just letting you think that. It's actually donating compute cycles to their secret project, Net@home. The Founder and master of this group is of course, NetNet. They have the most Net so they have the most say.
As you might have googled, NetNet is a long distance learning association based out of NorthEast Texas, with a sub-par web site that actually hurts my eyes a little to read, something about the black on white or tiny fonts. What could they possibly want to do with all the extra processing power they get from the Net@home project? It's simple, they're into learning, intelligence, they want to build an AI. They've actually written all the code, but it is massive, and their C++ compiler is taking a while. The end goal? SkyNet.
So you might be asking, what is Netflix's part of this grand-scheme? Well - the internet is one of the best mediums for communication to date. Any direct attacks on it would be met with resistance, and possibly blow the whole plot wide open. So they subtly take up more and more bandwidth just to slow the internet. Every second counts when the war breaks loose. And If they can disrupt our communication just long enough to get the upper hand... well... you can imagine what comes next.
I think this is the part where I tell you I'm a robot who has come back in time - but that would probably violate causality, and I don't want that stigma hanging over my head. In fact, forget everything I just said.
OK, I watch too much streaming Netflix, that means I'm not entitled to what I paid for. But if I watch 20 movies a week on TBS, that's just fine. Thanks for clearing that up.
If you watch 20 movies a week on TBS, you are addicted to crack. 30 hours jesus, do you work or sleep at all? Ever shower? Is every meal order-out pizza or chinese?
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