Why You'll Pay For Netflix — Even If You Don't Subscribe To Netflix

Velcroman1 writes "At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, Netflix announced Super HD, an immersive theatrical video format that looks more lifelike than any Web stream, even competing with Blu-Ray discs. But there's a costly catch. To watch the high-definition, 1080p movies when they debut later this year, you'll need a specific Internet Service Provider. Those on Cablevision or Google Fiber are in; those served by Time Warner or a host of smaller providers will be out of luck. But regardless of whether you subscribe to Netflix, you may end up paying for it, said Fred Campbell, a former FCC legal adviser who now heads The Communications Liberty & Innovation Project think tank. 'Instead of raising the price of its own service to cover the additional costs, Netflix wants to offload its additional costs onto all Internet consumers,' Campbell said. 'That's good for Netflix and bad for everyone else in the Internet economy.'"

Comments

Shill (deliberately?) misunderstanding CDNs..

[nweaver]

The 1080p Netflix service is only available when the ISP allows Netflix to deploy CDN (Content Delivery Network) nodes in the ISP's network.

Now true this is unfair to those ISPs who don't allow Netflix to deploy CDN nodes, but in general, CDNs save both the content provider and the ISP money: instead of traffic traversing the ISP's Internet connections, its served locally from the CDN nodes. So it acts to save the ISP money, not cost them. If 1080p videos are twice as large, but things are cached in the local network 75% of the time, the ISP sees substantial savings.

The only reason a major ISP would not want a Netflix node is that they are worried about Netflix competing with their (non Internet) TV services.

Overall, the Fox "article" is clear propaganda, written by and interviewing those who either, through ignorance or will, misunderstanding how CDNs operate.

Ya no kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

Akamai has done this kind of thing forever. When I worked at Network Operations for the university I work at, Akamai approached us. They wanted to install cache engines in our data center. They would provide us all the hardware, 3 fairly high end servers and a switch, as well as support for setting them up. All we had to do was put them in.

Net result? About an immediate 5 mbps average drop in our traffic, more at peak times. This was back in like 2002, and we only had like 100 mbps of Internet total.

It was all kinds of great. We had less network traffic, people got much faster videos, MS updates, and so on (Akamai is used by a lot of companies), and of course Akamai saves on bandwidth on their end. Everyone won, it was better service/less cost for all parties.

The thinktank opposes Net Neutrality

[Nimey]

Per Ars Technica, this thinktank's got a history of opposing Net Neutrality.

Actually, read the Ars article. It's better quality than this paid hit piece. Did anyone notice that the final link in the summary goes to Fox Propaganda?