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T-Mobile Adds YouTube To Its Zero-Rated Binge On Program (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: T-Mobile is expanding its Binge On program. The wireless carrier on Thursday announced that it is adding YouTube and seven other video services including Discovery Go, Google Play Movies, and Red Bull TV to its program which allows subscribers to stream as much as they want without billing the usage against their data plan. The carrier says that its partners can now optimize the video as well, with YouTube being the first service to make use of the feature. From an Ars Technica report, "Binge On is enabled by default and affects nearly all video regardless of whether a video provider has joined the program. Binge On throttles video streams and downloads to about 1.5Mbps, forcing the video services to deliver lower quality, typically about 480p. Video services that meet some technical requirements also get their data "zero-rated" so that customers can watch shows without it counting against high-speed data limits." Many have raised concerns about Binge On and the way it handles internet traffic. Some strongly believe that T-Mobile's program violates Net Neutrality. Earlier this year, privacy rights group, EFF, also expressed its concerns, adding that Binge On was just "throttling of all data." Interestingly, YouTube was one of the key video platforms which hadn't joined Binge On when T-Mobile first introduced the program last year. At the time, the Google-owned video portal said, "Reducing data charges can be good for users, but it doesn't justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent." Not sure what made YouTube change its heart.
Still no twitch.tv?
This is not T-Mobile, it is T-Mobile US. Obviously that is a significant difference, but I am not surprised that the editor did not notice the inaccuracy.
The fact is HD video targeting a 5-inch OLED cell phone screen only needs 1.5Mbit/s at 1080p h.264; h.265 can apparently get as small as half the bitrate for the same quality.
If you try to view a 3 minute video, watch the first 15 seconds, and buffer 2 minutes across your 12Mbit/s connection, you've spent 15 seconds holding the pipe at a high data rate only to discard all that data. With 100 users, that's got to be a 1.2Gbit pipe, and so you have to provide that kind of service with the cost divided among 100 users.
If the data is throttled to 1.5Mbit/s, suddenly you can provide that kind of streaming video service to 800 users at once. They can each pay 1/8 as much of the cost, and they all receive the same service they were trying to get anyway. If they switch to something other than video, you have to give them the full 12Mbit/s; but if they're watching Netflix, you can cut back their pipe for that particular stream.
T-Mobile has observed that this makes it reasonable to just *not* meter data if they throttle the pipe while people watch Netflix. The more of their video traffic they swing under this strategy, the more costs they save; and the end result *should* be transparent to the user. There have been a few bugs--the download bitrate is throttled if you try to download a video file because the DPI is too dumb to recognize you're not streaming--but it mostly works as advertised.
So long as they make reasonable effort to supply the same service as an unthrottled connection--you can still watch as many Netflix or Youtube streams (on a phone, that's ONE) as with generic service--they haven't slowed down access or created a premium service; they've ensured a service works at minimal cost, maximizing efficiency and reducing the cost to the consumer.
Broken is still broken, but it's not an evil conspiracy. Someone will still say they're trying to cut cost and screw the consumer while ignoring that they outright stop charging the consumer for the data.
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And honestly, I don't want this. I have unlimited data already, and I would prefer to watch in HD, or at least at 720p at the very least. I don't want to watch stuff at 480 again. The fact that this can force me to watch in lower def (at least according to reports from when this was announced, don't actually know if it's true) pisses me off more than anything, and that would still be true even if I didn't have unlimited data.
This should be an account setting to opt-in or out according to your preferences.
They can default it to opt-in all they want, but users that are willing to consume their plan's data allotment to get higher quality data streams should be allowed to do so.
Maybe they are chrome-casting it to a bigger screen?
If you don't like it, there is an option to turn it off, and stream full speed. It just uses your data allowance.
Yes, this is on by default (and if we're being reasonable, this isn't really a horrible thing at all) however this is an optional thing that people with unlimited data or want higher quality video can turn off, either through the account management website, the tmobile app, or "you can dial #BNG# (#264#) to check your Binge On status, #BOF# (#263#) to disable Binge On, and #BON# (#266#) to enable Binge On."
It seems like a pretty reasonable way to handle high traffic load with slightly obtuse but not very difficult opt out options for those like me who have unlimited data, a phablet, and a discerning eye.
Why data caps exist in the first place is a whole other issue...
"...believe" it violates Net Neutrality is about like "believing" in global warming. It's a fact. Denying facts only says something about the denier.
I thought of this a few years back when Google was paying to open up the hotspots at airports for free during the Christmas holidays (dunno if they still do that). The original push for Net Neutrality came when ISPs were trying to increase costs by charging a transaction fee to both the buyer and the seller. Somewhere along the line the concept got genericized to where any transaction with the buyer should only be with their ISP, and any transaction with the seller should only be with their ISP.
What happens when someone subverts this structure? What if the seller (website) offers to pay the buyer (you) directly? YouTube could. They make ad money every time you view a video. What if they offered to pay you a portion of that revenue each time you viewed a video? Now what if they notice you're viewing it over a high-cost mobile connection, and offer to send your payment as a credit to your mobile carrier offsetting your data costs, instead of a direct deposit into your bank account? (Pretend they're trying to increase adoption of their mobile app, so they aren't offering payments for viewing on your computer.) You basically end up with what's happening here - T-Mobile allowing you to access YouTube over your phone for free.
See, people got so wrapped up with the principle of Net Neutrality (that each person/company should only have to pay their own ISP), that they lost sight of the reason why we wanted Net Neutrality. Increasing costs is a symptom of economic inefficiency. Decreasing costs happen when you make economic transactions more efficient. We want to make the economy more efficient. That's what gives up productivity gains, and increases our standard of living despite us doing the same amount of work as before.
When ISPs tried to raise costs by charging websites (who would be forced to pass the extra cost onto the end customer), that was adding an economic inefficiency to the system. Net Neutrality was suggested as a principal we could follow which could thwart that inefficiency from expanding. Now we have a situation where a website is offering to lower the cost for the end customer. Yes it also happens to violate the principle of Net Neutrality. But lowering costs by increasing efficiency is the overall goal here that the concept of Net Neutrality was created to enforce. In other words, we've encountered a situation where the simplified rule of Net Neutrality runs counter to the desired goal of increased economic efficiency. That suggests the original rule was too simplified.
I'm trying to think of a way this T-Mobile/YouTube deal could end up costing the end customer more money. Yeah it makes other video streaming sites relatively less desirable, but their absolute desirability is the same as before because the cost to stream their data hasn't gone up. At least not unless T-Mobile is doing something underhanded and increasing their rates to make this YouTube deal a net profit for them.
Idiots have a lot of strong beliefs. Smarter people have more doubts.
...my cost of service has not changed, yet our entire family is watching 100s of hours of MORE video each month thanks to BingeOn. How anyone thought this was a bad idea, I just don't get. TURN IT OFF if you don't agree with it philosophically.
Damn, I literally just posted in this thread; this was the next post I read after. I'd mod you Insightful if I could.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Patient: "Doc! It hurts when I do this!"
Doctor: "Then don't do that."
Binge On has nothing to do with Net Neutrality.
The objections to Binge On are from some bizarro world. If you want to use it to help manage your bandwidth utilzation, use it. If you don't like that then don't use it. Use full bandwidth all the time.
Geez, people. Not everything is a vast conspiracy to take away your freedoms.
...think that T-Mobile would offer this service if it wasn't allowed to throttle the video streams? That is why net neutrality is a con.
Is this post satire?
Not only that these fuckers are making a huge profit on customers charging 3-4 times what they should be charging, they are selling us this shit and calling it icecream?
No. We didn't want net Neutrality in order to make things more efficient; we want it in order to keep things FAIR.
Binge On is tantamount to censorship, in the sense that T-Mobile is directly limiting the amount of non-"participating" video you can view.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I love the program. I couldn't care less about 1080 out 720p video on my crappy smart phone and this way YouTube doesn't eat up all my bandwidth for pixels I can't see anyway, but there are some real nasty questions around net neutrality. Still if you think this'll hurt new players in the streaming video market you're nuts. The barrier to entry there is already so high this isn't even a bump in the road for them
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm trying to think of a way this T-Mobile/YouTube deal could end up costing the end customer more money. Yeah it makes other video streaming sites relatively less desirable, but their absolute desirability is the same as before because the cost to stream their data hasn't gone up. At least not unless T-Mobile is doing something underhanded and increasing their rates to make this YouTube deal a net profit for them.
The problem lies with a lack of transparency (in the contract and advertisements) and applying this policy to sites without their consent.
A file like robots.txt (like streamingpolicy.txt) would have been more useful (including a way to signal both-ways when low-bandwidth streaming is enabled, while notifying the user (!).
Yeah it makes other video streaming sites relatively less desirable, but their absolute desirability is the same as before because the cost to stream their data hasn't gone up.
This is only true right now.
ISPs like to trump around saying things such as "99% of our users only use 1GB a month of metered data!" as a justification of setting their cap at 1GB.
As more and more websites/services to pay ISPs to zero-rate those websites/services, ISPs could (and probably will), proudly proclaim that "99% of our users only use 0.5GB a month of metered data!", and lower the cap to 0.5GB. And so on and so on... until the cap gets low enough to seriously hurt the traffic of any website/service not paying to be zero-rated. This effectively forces these websites to pay, otherwise their users will be unable to use their offered service.
Now, if we had some sort of promise that the ISPs wouldn't reduce the cap on metered data in response to the inevitable reduction of use of metered data, then I'd be all in favor of zero-rated content. But we're talking about ISPs here.
In my experience of the Interwebs, as seen from outside the US, most American's act as if they believe that:
1) Everything on the English-speaking part of the Internet is US-centric site.
2) The Earth is a US-centric site.
This is seriously annoying to the other 95.6 % of us people on the friggin' planet.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Binge On is tantamount to censorship, in the sense that T-Mobile is directly limiting the amount of non-"participating" video you can view.
Not sure about that; it could just as easily be flipped around to say that Binge On is increasing the amount of video viewed from non-participating sites, because a customer might have a fairly fixed amount of YouTube videos they watch, but now they can do that and still have data to spare before hitting their caps.
So they fire up another video site and watch some of it, where before Binge On they'd not bother.
I wonder what's the cost for content providers to join Binge On? Unless it's onerous, I really can't see the censorship part of it.
http://www.bingeoff.com/
This, and Comcast's antics with intranet shennigans....... Where the heck is enforcement of Net Neutrality? NN needs to be enforced, or it's utterly pointless and we have to concede we do not have it.
And I don't mean petty fines that the big companies can absorb as a cost of doing business. REAL ENFORCEMENT!
...but only because it can be turned on or off by the customer. I keep it shut off on my account, but I rarely stream video anyway. Watching video on even a large-screen phone just doesn't have much appeal to me. If I'm at home, I want a large screen, and if I were using a Chromecast I'd be on Wi-Fi anyway. If I'm away from home, there aren't many places I'd be wanting to watch video at all, especially on a phone. Indeed, I find autoplay videos infuriating.
My plan is soft-capped at 3 GB/month, and I rarely go beyond 2 GB. T-Mobile's service now is vastly better than it was three years ago, and as long as features like this are impartial and user-controllable, I have no real problem with them.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Consider how many ISPs there are on this planet. Now, just writing an email to each one of them to ask them to be put on some special list and tracking all the responses alone would be a major undertaking. Let alone ajdusting to each ISP's proprietary rules for being allowed onto the list. That is not how large open systems work efficiently. Just imagine if you had to set up an agreement with every ISP out there for email exchange if you wanted to set up your own mail server--that simply wouldn't work.
If this actually were about technical efficiency, they could as well specify a protocol or an API that allowed special treatment of video streams by their infrastructure regardless of the source, as long as the source is using that protocol--which would mean that other ISPs could implement the same protocol, allowing anyone to stream efficiently through any ISP's infrastructure, just as anyone can send mail to and receive mail from any ISP on the planet simply by registering a domain name and following the DNS and SMTP protocols.
And with everyone I do not mean everyone that provides content but also users of content.
A lot of posts here say it's not a problem for some company to pay on behalf of their users. And right is isn't. As long as its fair and everyone gets at least a halfway similar price for the same service.
If a content provider can pay some amount X, which most likely amounts to cents per user, to effectively raise every users data cap by 16 gigabytes a day then every user should be able to pay the same for themselves to raise their own data cap for a single service and throttled to the same speed.
As long as the content provider pays cell provider the going rate per GB that a regular user also pays for increasing its cap everything is fine.
But instead the user has to pay several orders of magnitude more if they want that amount of data on any service of their choosing. On my contract I can increase my cap by 100 megabytes for 2 Euro. Charge Users the same per GB for what content providers pay for zero rated uses and nobody would complain.
Your choice of terminology reveals that you don't understand the issue: in reality, there is no such thing as a "content provider" as a separate and distinct class on the Internet. T-Mobile should not be making a distinction between Netflix and the proverbial Icecast server in some random guy's basement! In principle, all users are content providers.
And even though Binge On is apparently free for the content provider, it's still a problem because this pdf is the only thing I can easily find about how to join it, and although it's sorely lacking in detail, it's fairly clear that setting it up requires manual coordination with T-Mobile, which they obviously aren't going to be willing to do for anyone who isn't a fairly large company. Moreover, even if setting it up were as easy for the content provider as typing your domain name into a web form and clicking a "binge on me" button, that still would prove to be an unreasonable burden when every other ISP started doing the same thing and every random guy with an Icecast server had to spend huge quantities of time signing up with all the ISPs. Netflix can pay somebody to do that as a full-time job; normal people can't.
This makes me think of another issue: as a T-Mobile user, how do I enable Binge On zero-rating for video uploaded from my phone? The inability to do that violates the principle of net neutrality, too!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Arguably ... but groups like FTF clearly believed it was a real issue. I wasn't going to get into that whole debate with them. If you're hung up on semantics, I suppose it is an issue because a zero tolerance for "zero rating" schemes means it doesn't fit the net neutrality wording of what's allowed.
I think "Binge On" is a pragmatic solution to bandwidth problems and providing customers what they want at the lowest possible cost. Some people are taking a hard line approach to all of this - but I think that's something that's just not going to realistically happen because of the relative scarcity of cellular data bandwidth.
When T-Mobile offered something similar with unlimited music streaming when you used one of a list of supported services, you didn't see anyone complaining. Eventually, they added so many services, you could stream music from practically anyplace you'd ever want to.
Your choice of terminology reveals that you don't understand the issue:
That's perhaps true, however I'm comfortable being on the side of the argument that is not likening Binge On to "censorship".
Also, I should state that I'm really quite ambivalent about Binge On, and as a non-American, it has absolutely no impact on me.
in reality, there is no such thing as a "content provider" as a separate and distinct class on the Internet.
Ok, I can somewhat agree with that - I host "content" on my home PC httpd, so it is true that everyone is or can be, to some degree, a "provider".
T-Mobile should not be making a distinction between Netflix and the proverbial Icecast server in some random guy's basement!
Again, how is Icecast guy being negatively affected by Binge On?
With users being able to gorge themselves on "data-cap free" videos, isn't it also possible that Icecast Guy can have more potential listeners due to people being able to consume more content without overage fees?
In principle, all users are content providers.
And even though Binge On is apparently free for the content provider, it's still a problem because this pdf is the only thing I can easily find about how to join it, and although it's sorely lacking in detail, it's fairly clear that setting it up requires manual coordination with T-Mobile, which they obviously aren't going to be willing to do for anyone who isn't a fairly large company. Moreover, even if setting it up were as easy for the content provider as typing your domain name into a web form and clicking a "binge on me" button, that still would prove to be an unreasonable burden when every other ISP started doing the same thing and every random guy with an Icecast server had to spend huge quantities of time signing up with all the ISPs. Netflix can pay somebody to do that as a full-time job; normal people can't.
This makes me think of another issue: as a T-Mobile user, how do I enable Binge On zero-rating for video uploaded from my phone?
I can't speak to the implementation details, I have not read that pdf but trust you that it lacks details.
And should all ISPs start with a similar program, well, then the situation has changed and my opinion might change too.
As for uploading, why should they zero-rate uploading of data? Separate issue. Just because it's a free one-way ticket doesn't mean one is owed a free return trip.
The inability to do that violates the principle of net neutrality, too!
That I'm not sure about. As another commenter posted, this can be argued to be beneficial to T-Mobile's customers without setting up a fee structure for the ISP to charge both ends of the content-to-consumer link for access.
So I think it's probably a bit more of a grey area regarding Net Neutrality.