AT&T Plans To Launch Internet Video Service

An anonymous reader writes "AT&T officially announced on Tuesday their intention to launch a Netflix-like service in collaboration with an investment group run by a former Fox president. AT&T is following in the footsteps of Verizon, which partnered with Redbox in 2012 to offer the same type of service, and like Verizon, is also still negotiating with Netflix on payments to not throttle Netflix traffic."

Comments

Net Neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no reason to believe they won't give this full bandwidth while throttling the competition, giving themselves the edge they need to succeed.

AT&T to Netflix:

[Zalbik]

Hey Netflix, that's some awfully nice bandwidth ya got there....be a shame if anything happened to it....

Netflix fucked up when they paid

[Karmashock]

What they should have done is informed their users that their ISP is slowing the traffic that they paid for down intentionally in violation of if not the letter of their contracts then at the very least the common understanding and spirit of the contract.

And if the courts didn't find that behavior to be fraud then the bad marketing and political fallout would do the real work.

By paying, netflix took all the heat off the ISPs and allowed them to get away with it.

Netflix... making bad decisions yet again.

Re:Netflix fucked up when they paid

[Anonymous Coward]

peering and CDN's have been around since the 90's and are considered best practices today to distribute video content on the internet
netflix has contracted with peering services and CDN's in the past
everyone knows the games cogent and level 3 were playing taking on netflix at cut rate prices and refusing to pay their part of the peering costs

this is why they never sued any ISP, the case would be laughed out of court once discovery was done and all the evidence was presented

Re:Netflix fucked up when they paid

[CastrTroy]

Also, if Amazon is hosting the content, how could they throttle Netflix without throttling the rest of Amazon? Unless they are looking in the packets, they probably can't tell what belongs to Netflix, and what doesn't. So they should just encrypt the data, even with something that isn't resource intensive to prevent the ISPs from peeking at what's in the packets. It doesn't even have to be very secure. Just encrypted/encoded enough to stop the equipment from scanning the packets to find out what's inside.

Re:Netflix fucked up when they paid

[alen]

AWS is only the authentication part. the content is spread around their leased data centers and colo sites

i did some googling and since 2008 netflix used contract with limelight for CDN and lots of third party peering services. as well as transit from cogent and L3. problem is they always cut profit thin deals where the value for the provider was mostly learning to deal with the traffic. even limelight said they made almost no profit on the netflix deal.

instead of paying more in network costs like HBO and everyone else does netflix came out with their own CDN and wanted ISP's to host them for free. unlike the current arrangements where CDN's pay the ISP's for hosting and bandwidth. and netflix started super HD right at the time they screwed up their distribution system and went on their PR parade saying how bad all these ISP's are.

i don't know what the deal with AT&T and Verizon is but with comcast the difference is netflix is paying comcast directly instead of the other services they used to
pay. win/win for everyone and cutting out the middlemen

and if you look at netflix's financials their tech costs are less than 1/10 of revenues and content costs are 3/4 of revenues. their problem is they are just a low margin middle man for content and make very little profit

Re:Data cap

[TheRealMindChild]

They won't raise the cap. Using their service just won't count against your cap