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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.
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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Then turn it off. It's opt-in by default, but you can turn it off.
There's nothing stopping you from getting every last bit if you want to burn data.
if you think this is only driven by T-mobile you are deluding yourself. it's driven by money and all the big content companies on the internet don't want to spend it on upcoming upgrades. having their customers watch their content in low data streams is saving netflix, google and anyone else who signs up a lot of money
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.
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.