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Netflix CEO Accuses Comcast of Not Practicing Net Neutrality
braindrainbahrain writes "Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has a Facebook page in which he posts a short gripe about Comcast. It seems watching video through the Xfinity app on an Xbox does not counting towards your cap on your Comcast data plan. All other services, Netflix included, do. To quote Hastings: 'For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all. The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment. In what way is this neutral?'"
The difference, of course, is that you need a Comcast cable TV subscription in order to have the Xfinity app not count toward your monthly data usage allowance. Then again, you can't exactly sign up for a similar plan through Netflix or Hulu.
Not really true. Comcasts WAN is part of the internet. Remember internet is a network of networks.
"When the free market turns against them"
Actually, that's never happened. There's never been a free global communications market.
Infrastructure, and those running it, are regulated and taxed/subsidized at different levels at different times, markets, and media.
Multicast only works as a bandwidth savings device when you're streaming the same content at the same time to multiple devices. I'm not familiar with the Comcast Xfinity service, but to be able to glean any reasonable measure of savings you'd have to watch Xfinity like you do regular TV - shows scheduled at a certain time, not streamed on demand.
Fun fact: Apparently Chrome detects this behavior (by trying to load several nonsensical URLs in the background) and blocks it. 3 Chrome.