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Netflix Gets What It Pays For: Comcast Streaming Speeds Skyrocket
jfruh (300774) writes "Back in February, after a lengthy dispute, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for network access after being dogged by complaints of slow speeds from Comcast subscribers. Two months later, it appears that Comcast has delivered on its promises, jumping up six places in Netflix's ISP speed rankings. The question of whether this is good news for anyone but Comcast is still open."
Fuck Comcast
it seems like it's really good news for the people who stream Netflix on Comcast.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
1. I Pay Comcast for internet access at X speed.
2. I Pay Netflix to send me movies via that line that I pay for.
3. Comcast holds my content hostage, wanting an extortion payment from NetFlix.
I see.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I hope we at least have water neutrality where we don't get charged more for using water for showering as opposed to washing the car. thats where its all going folks.
They would have offered to play netflix streaming server mirrors in their regional Headends to give real speed boosts.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Really, netflix, congratulations. Very disruptive of you and all that. And the transition from a primarily USPS model to a substantially streaming service (barring that one really embarrassing fuckup that you could hardly have handled worse, oh how we chuckled over here...) Really sticking it to the stogy incumbents.
Now, it would be a pity if your customers were to... experience service disruptions... would it not?
it's barely been a month & comcast's already completed all those network upgrades? you know, all that capital investment that was required b/c of netflix that they didn't have the $ for until a month ago? that's impressively fast considering how long it takes them to fix the most basic problems for individual customers!
Obviously Netflix will just pass the cost on to its subscribers (where else would they get the money from?). It's very unlikely they'd implement this as a surcharge for their Comcast subscribers only (I wish they would, but I expect their contract with Comcast prohibits it), they'll just absorb it into the single subscription price. So in fact non-Comcast customers will effectively be indirectly paying Comcast to subsidise other users' access.
From an engineer's point of view it's all baffling (Netflix and their customers are both paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, so where's the need for anything more?), but when you view it through the lens of capitalist incentives it all makes perfect sense.
"...for anyone but Comcast is still open."
It was never a question, nor open. The answer is no. It is painfully obvious this benefits Comcast and hurts everyone else.
On a long enough time-line, this is bad news for everyone; and not just netflix or comcast users. It's a slap in the face to network neutrality. Dane-geld in a manner of speaking; Will all ISP's need to pay for preferential access to content for their customers? Sure netflix can afford to pay, for now.. but how does a new player ever enter the market if they can't afford to pay for access to customers? =/
I have a feeling they'll be shaking down Microsoft for xbox live customers. I
Sums it up nicely.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I can see why Comcast did this. They wanna make sure people still stick with Cable.
This is ground zero for the net neutrality fight. We need strong Net Neutrality to keep this BS from happening. Comcast is gaining a position where it will implicitly own a share of every company delivering service to its customers. The Comcast and TWC merger is going to make things infinitely worse.
I want some, cause it's clearly as good as BTL chips.
What Netflix is paying for, is a bribery fee so that Comcast quit throttling them. The proof?
As soon as the agreement was reached, I could finally stream Netflix in 3D. Oh, and we all know they didn't get their peering equipment in within 3 days....
The other evil empire (AT&T) is royally screwing us via U-Verse, jacking up every fee, every month.
We are thinking about dumping U-Verse and getting JUST internet from Comcast (no land line, no cable).
We can get about 50 digital channels over the air, plus streaming.
YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!
Capitalism, american capitalism, basically encourages this twisted practice of squeezing as much cash by hook or by crook out of anyone even remotely related to your service. Looking to companies to solve the problem is like looking at a cigarette lighter to fix your burning house.
br. America has no recourse for evil companies, in fact it prides itself on this fact.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So, does TIVO work with OTA HD signals?
Now is a great chance for the competition to "listen to their customers" and increase Netflix performance on their networks without charging Netflix or their customers (directly).
You know, do what they are supposed to do but spin it to make Comcast look like worse than they already do.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
So Netflix ponies up the money & Comcrap is able to provide no-stutter streaming. It appears to be true. At my girlfriend's place (Comcrap) we couldn't watch Netflix but now it runs fine. At my house (Uverse... Uvile?) we could watch Netflix but now, as in the last two nights, it stutters & is unwatchable. Purely anecdotal but yea, they both suck. Maybe I change providers again... back to Wide Open West!!
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
I'm in Tampa, and my service for Netflix has gone down slowly but surely for many months. At this point during peak access it shows me video that looks akin to 240p YouTube clips. Fingers crossed that these clowns overstep their bounds and force some net neutrality legislation.
Is it in the realm of possibility, at the prices that customers are willing to currently pay, to deliver on demand content near blu-ray level quality to a whole neighborhood? If 25% of my neighborhood suddenly decided to stream the new Hobbit movie, I doubt Verizon could cope with a few dozen households suddenly demanding reliable streaming of upwards of 50GB of content unless that content was hosted on servers with preferred QoS rules or something.
If you have a company and pay for Internet connectivity, then you already paying what is necessary for that volume of data. The speed should be the same for everyone. Otherwise new businesses cannot form on the net on equal terms. This is important for freedom and even for the market economy. However, without net neutrality will end up in a time of monopoly (or oligopoly). Only this time the monopoly is not governed by the state and at least in theory controlled by the public.
For the US, dropping net neutrality makes sense from a corporate state viewpoint, as all big Internet services are US-based (beside those in China). If you hinder any other new service you can guarantee that those corporations stay in business, because the ramp up cost for new players would be too high. Also peer-to-peer technologies which could flourish with IPv6 can be crippled right before they become dangerous for the establishment.
You must be new here. Or trolling. Or perhaps new to trolling here.
It would be a shame if ... something ... happened to that nice video streaming business you got there.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I'm beginning to wonder if Netflix did this on purpose, to gain sympathy and to highlight the actual problems around net-neutrality.
It makes sense, instead of making bold claims about what might happen, they went ahead and just let it happen..
It's sort of like a person going into a bad neighborhood, getting roughed up and then telling everyone about how much of a bad part of town that was, look he's even a victim!
This chart is easy to show to politicians and policymakers, and it exposes the simple fact that Comcast clearly **had** the capacity before these payments, they were just withholding.
Personally, I think it's a very smart move on Netflix's part, they are playing the long game.
The question of whether this is good news for anyone but Comcast is still open
Seriously?
Seriously????
No it doesn't; it's clearly been answered. This is like asking the question if a protection racket or a mob run union stoppage is good for business in a community. Comcast might as well go throw bricks through Netflix's office and demand protection insurance.
with Comcast. This allows Netflix to stop paying others for connecting their services to Comcast's network and gives Netflix's servers a direct link to Comcast. Comcast says "Sure, but pay us to do that." Netflix weighs that cost vs current costs and the benefits to them of ensuring faster streaming and says "OK." Sure they would like to do it for free but ultimately decided paying was the best option. Comcast no doubt wants to find ways to make money as streaming becomes more popular than cable and this is one way to do it. Netflix needs to keep customers happy and Comcast has a way to do that, at a price; and as a result that make a deal. It's a simple business decision on both sides.
While it would be nice to have everything streamed at max speed the reality is Comcast (and others) need to manage the network for all users; and if Netflix is a major bandwidth user then throttling them makes sense; even if it means degraded performance. If this agreement allows fast streaming and has less of an impact on other users then the users benefit as well from the deal.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
We have laws against that... unless you have lots of money, then laws are irrelevant! :-/
Yesterday netflix was looking great, yet when I tried to check my e-mail, nothing. Speedtest didn't even load. I assumed someone else in the building was torrenting. The whole building shares a comcast line of some type, included in rent, and at best it's exactly as bad as you'd expect. Now the internet is going to be unusable for anything OTHER than netflix.
I really have to hand it to comcast to finding ways to consistently make things worse than expected.
It's already there: people will automatically prioritize showers over washing the car, for instance. We've got places in the country with tier-metering on all their utilities (water, electricity, and gas, at any rate). Also known as "use-based fees" in the Orwellian world we live in. (They're not use-based, they're disproportionate to use as they are often nearly scalar, not linear.)
It would make sense, if it wasn't for the fact that Comcast operates as a government-sponsored monopoly.
They get away with this crap because their potential customers are prohibited from operating: there is no free market. In a free market, you'd probably have full gigabit fibre to the home as an option in most metropolitan areas at this point. As it is, ISPs rarely can even gain the rights to offer service in areas due to exclusive deals Comcast has brokered by greasing the palms of local officials.
Capitalist incentives, if they were in play, would lead to a mass exodus from Comcast. There's really nothing 'capitalist' about how Comcast operates, except that they use money.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This. IF Comcast was actually throttling the traffic to Netflix (or Cogent), then it's a very bad thing indeed. I haven't seen any documented evidence, or even a public source claim that though. Is there any proof? (my gut tells me they were, but without some form of proof, how do we know?)
Otherwise, if they were not throttling traffic, then it's a different issue. Because all it means is that Netflix was paying Cogent, but the bandwidth between Cogent and Comcast wasn't sufficient for their needs. In that case, like any ISP customer they have the choice of becoming a customer of Comcast too, which is essentially what has happened. It would have been nice of Comcast to give them a free ride, for the benefit of the rest of Comcast's customers, but I don't begrudge them taking their pound of flesh.
If on the other hand Comcast was throttling their traffic, then Comcast should be sued for as much as possible. I don't know under what laws they could be sued (racketeering?), but this is the USA... anyone can be sued for anything.
Yay, extortion, who's next on the list? hulu, crackle, amazon prime, torrents, multiplayer gaming, etc.... Isn't net neutrality death a wonderful thing? why not just vote with our wallets by cancelling verizon, comcast, twc service and let them die out which will be a threat to our economy(relies on the internet these days for commerce) and maybe we will have better ISP's popping out and about.
I hope in the future we will have cpu's/gpu(integrated) designed for super duper real-time high compression that can take a 1kbyte-1mbyte(compressed) movie file or whatever and expand/execute it in seconds upwards to 50gbyte - 100gbyte(high def) data. Would be great for streaming movies and reducing bandwidth.
There are so few movies worth seeing that if you include the monthly fees that Comcast charges, it's actually cheaper to go and buy the DVD at Target.
And if you wait, the DVD will probably by on sale for $10 or less.
Everyone I know who sticks with cable does so for one reason: sports. If ESPN every starts their own streaming service, Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and everyone else will get their due.
Netflix was paying a CDN that connected them to Comcast. Netflix wasn't happy with the CDN, so they negotiated with Comcast to connect directly, probably for less than what they were paying the CDN. Netflix is one of the only companies who have so much traffic that setting up their own CDN makes sense.
Basically, it wasn't extortion. It was Netflix paying Comcast direct instead of through a third party.
Learning nothing from history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dane-geld/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron
They'll provide ISPs with cache engines for their content. That way, it doesn't use near as much bandwidth. Their content gets pushed to the cache engine, and that streams to the customer. It is win-win since both the ISP -and- Netflix get to use less bandwidth.
So it isn't like the ISPs can whine that Netflix is just too heavy a load. They can get cache engines and call it good. Netflix even picks up the cost of said cache engines near as I know.
Cox does this. They've had fast streaming and "super HD" for a long time because they have Netflix cache engines. Comcast is just being greedy.
If you are going to do a proper slashdot car analogy it has to be direct! :)
This is like Shell (Shell being the only gas station you can get gas at), deciding that because you drive a Chevy Truck rather than a Toyota Pirus, that Chevy has to pay up additional fees because a Truck uses more gas than a Pirus, even though you already purchase more gas at the standard rate. Then Shell saying the rational for this is that Trucks put an undue hardship on the distribution of enough gas for everyone.
They shouldn't have paid. They should have called comcast's bluff.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Actually we would all be better off if we had a source of potable water for showers & drinking, and cheaper grey water we could use for things like watering the lawn. Then fewer resources would be used processing all water to the tolerance of drinkability...
But it would also require double the piping infrastructure, so sadly probably not worth it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now Netflix has everything it needs for the FCC to shutdown Comcast permanently.
But when it looks hopeless, just remember the dark days of Microsoft monopoly. By 1998-2000 time frame, Microsoft could kill projects and make venture capital vanish for its upstart competition just by issuing press release about vaporware. It really did look hopeless back then, how any one could fight that behemoth. Now Microsoft is still pulling in huge revenues, but it does not look like the unbeatable titan it was seen to be.
Right now, the last mile wiring cost is so high, Comcast has this monopolistic advantage. But wireless-in-the-loop (WITL fiber optics to neighborhood pillar boxes, and wireles from there) technology or micro cell or femto cell networks or something we don't know yet might come in and upset the apple cart for Comcast. WITL is quite effective for sparsely populated rural areas and is quietly building up strength and robustness there. If/when it transitions to compete with wired connections to homes, it could prove to be effective.
Only thing that will save us is competition.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...works.
Netflix wanted new links into the Comcast network, just for them, as opposed to having all of their traffic come in via Comcast's normal Internetwork peering points. This would improve service, as it would bypass any peering point bottlenecks and lower latency.
Comcast said we will absolutely give you links into our network, just like anyone else, and here's how much it will cost.
Netflix wanted them for free.
Comcast said no.
This was a peering dispute, pure and simple. Content Providers are not entitled to free network access, period, end of story. Every single content provider on the internet is paying SOMEONE for network access, unless they've managed to successfully negotiate otherwise with the access provider. If I go out and start writing some blog that gets millions of hits a day from Comcast customers, I don't get to go to Comcast and explain to them how they need to turn up a new circuit just for me because their customers are already paying them for my content.
Get it through your heads - you are NOT paying for specific content when you pay your subscription fee. You are paying for a certain amount of metered access. If a content provider wants to be closer to the customers in order to improve service, then they get to pay for access to.
Are you using a Sony Blu-Ray player or otehr sony device to access Netflix?
If so that may be another possible issue.. Sony.. for whatever dumb reason programs their Blu-Ray devices to only access Netflix through Sony servers.
For us it became a huge bottle neck and the Sony streaming went to crap when every tablet and PC in the house streams flawlessly.
I guess this isn't an issue with the PS-3 or PS-4 but exists on other Sony streaming devices.
Insert a Roku and I'm getting HD quality again.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Comcast swore up and down that they didn't do traffic shaping on their networks. But now that Netflix has paid Comcast not to do traffic shaping and they've stopped. Doing what they said. They weren't. Doing. I don' geddit.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
...Manufacturers are now forced to pay more to ship their goods by air freight than by truck.
I'm pissed about this. I'm a netflix subscriber, but not a comcast user, but presumably my netflix subscription is going to suffer because of this. or are netflix going to charge comcast subscribers more?
ehhh - Netflix was paying it's provider for service.
The provider used a different peer.
Comcast was restricting / traffic shaping that peer (lower grade peer, yes, but still) it was Comcast illegally shaping traffic creating artificial slowdowns because they thought they could.
Netflix *paid* the price to remove those artificial blocks, and now Comcast has shot themselves in the foot by doing so. Netflix now has the evidence that it was always illegal traffic blocking / slowing down on Comcast's part to begin with.
It's time to watch the FCC take down Comcast - there won't be anything left to merge with Time Warner - another scum-sucking dirtbag of a content provider doing their best to imitate Sheriff of Nottingham by taxing content bandwidth that's already been paid for on both ends.
Bye Bye Comcast, you won't be missed.
So I can pay my ISP for internet access with sufficient bandwidth and monthly data allowance to take advantage of streaming video services, but if I try to access streaming video services using the internet access that I pay for, my ISP can reduce the quality of my connection to said streaming service such that it becomes unusable, then hold hostage their customer base (me) until the streaming service also pays up.
Yup. Sounds like capitalism to me.
We won't forget this.
Haha, that's what everyone said about the separating of DVD and streaming services, which was an effective price hike.
But in all seriousness, there was nothing special about the deal, it was a peering agreement, which is STANDARD procedure for EVERYONE. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with Net Neutrality. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea how the system works and has worked since the Internet originally went commercial. Not... One... Clue... This is how the Internet as most everyone knows it has always, always, worked.
For those who can't grasp this concept, here's an easy reference article: http://blog.streamingmedia.com...
I8-D
Barriers to entry. Comcast and Netflix have now raised the barriers to entry for any newcomers. Comcast gets paid, Netflix passes on the costs (eventually that will happen) and any newcomers will need to have a similar arrangement or their service will never get off the ground.
This is about preserving the status quo for all involved and locking out any new competition.
None of these guys are your friends.
Did they lay new fiber, or stopped throttling because Netflix paid?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Is the ISP throttling the reason all the YouTube videos are so damn slow?
The way things work ... ... Netflix charges you $7.99 or so per month assuming you're only subscribing to their streaming service.
Out of that money everything Netflix and everyone Netflix is paid INCLUDING license fees for movies AND
NOW ON TOP what COMCAST is extorting from Netflix.
That means Netflix has two (2) options:
A: They can increase their subscription fee substantially, say from $7.99 to $13.99
.
B: They can cut back on licensing content
Either way, YOU LOSE. You will either pay more or get less. That simple.
Who do you thank for all that? Comcast and "your" government.
YOU can thank "your" government because they are undermining NET NEUTRALITY and are
permitting Comcast to get away with this. Thank your congress-(wo)man in writing (letters please,
no email or fax). Next time vote independent too.
YOU can thank Comcast by getting rid of XFinity, returning your Comcast Set-top box and subscribing
only to their cable-internet service (if you don't have any better options). Give them a call at 1-800-934-6489
to cancel your TV service. (oops yeah you're not going to have TV but who watches TV nowadays anyways).
If they won't let you have internet without TV consider using their business offerings. These cost about
as much as you are paying right now for TV+internet BUT you will get better service AND IT HURTS THEIR
CAPABILITY TO UPSELL and that is what you really want. You see with only the internet offering they wont
have you purchase anything else from them and you won't participate in any of the other "XFinity"
offerings as well. THAT IS MONEY they were planning on and they're not getting and that is what you want.
You can get their "deluxe" 50/10 mbps for $109 a month which is about as much as people pay for TV and
internet. To get that call them up at (855) 319-0171.
You should also consider securing your traffic through COMCAST as well to make sure they lose out on
selling your data as well. Sure I pay extra but with an openvpn tunnel into Amazon EC2 I know Comcast
isn't seeing my traffic (and trying to get in my hair over downloading whatever).
YOU CAN HURT THEM BACK :-) DO IT:-)
That this turn of events is Netflix proving victimization by Comcast billing twice, and that it results in a big win for Net Neutrality (as this case proves the need for it) and a big loss for the Time Warner / Comcast merger (as this case proves they will use their monopoly power to the fullest to prevent entrepreneurial development and innovation).
Comcast didn't like their peering arrangement with Cogent due to the amount of traffic Netflix put through. Comcast wanted a piece of the money from Netflix so they throttled Netflix and only Netflix. Netflix had already paid for the bandwidth, Comcast acted entirely against the way that the internet has run for years and claimed that Netflix / Cogent should pay more to peer. Netflix offered to set up CDNs to lessen the load on Comcast and Comcast refused. It was Comcast being the dick and the customers who are going to get fucked, yet again and without lube.
NBCUniversal (ie. Comcast) owns part of Hulu. Of course they will always continue to grease those pipes.
And if I had a Netflix account, which I don't because I'm not American, I'd cancel it for just that reason. Caving in.
If you don't get the sarcasm of the post (especially the 'doubleplus good' reference), then try reading George Orwell's 1984 . Pay special attention to the section on NewSpeak.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
There's a reason Netflix is willing to pay for this network access; anyone who would want to compete with them would also have to pay Comcast for quality connectivity, so they are increasing the barrier to entry for other video streaming sites. Don't feel bad for them, it really only screws the consumers...
What Netflix is paying for is "a peering tie-in inside of Comcast's data centers".
You can call 'protection money' whatever you want. It's still Extortion.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Honestly, it isn't Comcast I'm scared of here, it's Netflix. By even attempting to broker this deal, they have effectively just given power over to the ISPs. They may have well have said "I, for one, welcome our toll-internet overlords."
TIme for a mass refund. period.
(also time for some law firm to make megabucks litigating this issue)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
My Time Warner connection + uTorrent + RSS Feeds + a few Private trackers beats the hell out of Netflix + Hulu + Cable TV + RedBox + etc..Only thing to make it much better would be Google Fiber but where I live that will be a decade away. I don't have to wait for things to come out on TV, Cable, Netflix, whatever. I can watch what I want, when I want how I want in most any format I want. I pay for the fastest home internet service here so Time Warner still gets enough from me. Nothing beats it... The only argument is morality and quite frankly I am not going to argue it anymore. 80% of what I watch is on over the air channels, I just rather watch the downloaded scene release with the commercials already cut out when I feel like watching it. I don't need a DVR this way either. Everything is shared on my LAN and my roommate and my living room has access to it.
That description of peering makes sense for a bunch of hops in a transit situation.
For the last hop to the customer where the customer asked for the traffic, I'm not so sure.
Your rules seem to say that the customer is only paying to send traffic.
Considering that the major ads show download speeds, this seems strange.
If Netflix is to fund the last hop to each customer,
then a hard to reach rural customer should have to pay Netflix more than an easy to reach urban one.
The customer would end up with a different bill from each content provider.
Having the customer compensate for this in a single payment to his rural or urban ISP makes much more sense.
Aside from the issues of killing new content providers, the path you propose doesn't make economic sense for the existing content providers.
It does make perfect sense from the perspective of a monopoly trying to extract all the revenue they can from their position.
This is going to be the downfall of netflix. Now that comcast knows they can extract money from Netflix they're going to keep squeezing them harder and harder.
-
If Netflix is now getting "preferred treatment" from Comcast, this MUST mean other services are suffering!
Which services have now become slow and "unusable"?
If no service has now become affected, then this would prove that Comcast targetted Netflix - shouldn't that be enough to start some sort of legal action against Comcast?