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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.'"
Yes, they want to upgrade for fast low latency connections, and the people with Pentium IV machines will not see the benefit. Just like the people who were paying for dialup didn't see the benefit of pipe-size increases that were in place to accommodate DSL.
But while net neutrality doesn't allow them to charge for "Netflix" (which is as it should be), there is nothing stopping them from charging extra for the awesome bandwidth that will get to the customers, and to use that extra charge to pay for the infrastructure upgrades. These upgrades during low-Netflix-use times may benefit others.
Right now I pay $120 a month for 25Mbits, no cap. My friends pay $80 a month for 20 Mbits with a 250GB cap. So they already have everything they need in place already. Watching 10 movies a month and doing nothing else, you would blow through the cap and need the upgrade. Article's author is a troll.
To me it is a stretch. The ISPs are not fools. If the Netflix customers want special high speed access, they will be forced to cough extra cash for that privilege. And that money will upgrade the network for all customers. They may not be able to tack on a "fee for being a netflix customer". But they surely will tack on a fee for "50 Mbps service with guaranteed network latency of less than 200 millisecond" or whatever is the technical spec.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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Yes, you should be upset. Your ISP should be making infrastructure upgrades and paying for it from the billions in profit that they have made by overcharging you for the crap service you already receive. Instead, you somehow think it's ok for them to make you pay for them to upgrade their service when they should have been doing it all along.
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.
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?
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E pluribus sanguinem
Problem is that is what the ISPs have been selling. It screwed up the peering model already, and next it will impact the ISPs.
The issue here is that any ISP would rather be able to keep charging the same rate for the same service (or increasing the price each year), rather than get the same fee for providing ever-increasing bandwidth. As the infrastructure is paid off, the providers should either reinvest or drop rates; they prefer to do neither.
So, let me get this straight... An ISP can either take advantage of a free peering arrangement (paying only connection fees), or accept a free caching appliance, and ultimate ends up SAVING money through reduction in transit, but somehow this is Netflix making non-subscribers pay for SuperHD? TFS is bullshit, pure FUD.
Almost every ISP in Canada is already on Netflix OpenConnect, qualifying for SuperHD. Some of them are huge, like Bell, some of them are tiny little indie ISPs, like Colba. Many of them didn't do anything specific to get on OpenConnect, but got it for free by already participating in a peering point that Netflix is on, or using a transit provider on OpenConnect.
>Their point is that, from a market perspective, a service provider "buying in" to a service like this through upgrades exclusive to Netflix (probably in the way of CDN servers/bandwidth) don't pass that cost on to just the consumers using Netflix.
Yes, that is their point, and the grandparent's point is "that's bullshit." They have a mechanism in place to charge subscribers by bandwidth. They are buying "content access" they can serve to dramatically increase the amount of bandwidth their subscribers pay for. If your ISP gets another $40 a month for the bandwidth to enjoy HD moves as often as you enjoy SD movies, then the consumers that are using it are paying for it.
No it's not precise to the penny, some of Grandma's ISP fees may be going for this, but some of my fees have been subsidizing her unprofitable dialup connection for years. But then, some of your text messaging fees are paying for 911 service that you may have never used. Some of the cost of your voice minutes goes into handset development for handsets you don't want to buy. At Mel's diner my dinner tab includes the cost of ketchup that other diners use, and I HATE KETCHUP!
The article writer, and the industries for which he shills are greedy crybabies. Nothing more.
Look, this article is just another BS anti-net neutrality argument showing how the poor internet carriers can't afford to support rich Netflix's content. Powerful Netlix is strong arming the little Internet providers (like, ahem, Time Warner) into carrying all of that expensive streaming video and cutting off ISPs who won't play ball.
But the whole article is BS, and this is why: There is no buy in. No one is getting cut off.
According to TFA, Netflix is not forcing any ISP to carry this traffic and they are not charging any ISPs for the privilege. Netflix is providing local caching servers to minimize traffic across the national backbones. This will save Netflix money and save the ISPs money because local traffic is cheaper than backbone traffic. If Netflix really wanted to stick it to the ISPs, they could just turn on Super HD for all subscribers and really rack up the bills. Netflix is being downright polite with this. At best, Super HD will be a minor competitive advantage for a handful of ISPs who have the servers.
Best post in the thread so far hands down.
The simple fact is that if the ISP's would re-invest into their infrastructure they would be doing everyone a great service (themselves included), but instead they seem to be pissing away the profits and doing nothing really for their customers other than jacking up the prices for the same basic service. Of course there is absolutely zero incentive for them to do so in most markets since most have a utility style monopoly.
I got here through a series of tubes