Om Malik is beginning to suspect that “metered broadband” may be less about bad, evil P2P and more about competing video download services.
Stacey crunched the numbers yesterday and came up with an interesting conclusion: If you bought the monthly 15 mbps/40 GB transfer option for about $56 a month, you’d get about 40 hours of standard definition video along with enough bandwidth for your normal browsing and surfing habits. That’s just over 75 minutes of SD Internet video every day – two or three shows at best – which means you might need to continue buying the “video connection” in order to watch more television. Sure you can slice and dice the data transfers with other online activities, but this is all about video.
How close are you to ditching cable and watching all your shows online or through a “Netflix box?” Are you already there? Is cable the new “land line?”
Why Tiered Broadband Is the Enemy of Innovation [GigaOm](Thanks, Henry!)
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oh please verizon fios come to NYC before they cap me.
Cable is a “necessity” because there’s no better way to get my girlfriend to leave me alone to get stuff done than turning on the tv and letting her zone out to The Hills or some junk. Granted, this means my brain is slowly rotting, as well as my bank account, but it does keep the rest of me in shape…
@AtomicPlayboy:
Just so you know, the “parental choice” and “minority programming” lobbies are at 180 degrees from each other. Parental choice means choosing your content, which means a huge drop in penetration for minority content. As an example, BET is in the vast majority of US homes today – if people had to choose it and pay for it specifically, and even if every black family in America did, it would be in ~10% of US homes.
@AtomicPlayboy:
Also, bandwidth caps aren’t a “net neutrality” issue, any more than charging per minute for phone service was a common carrier violation. Honestly, the more pushback there is against active traffic shaping (i.e. slowing bittorrent), the more the broadband providers, and especially the cable guys, are going to go with the simple and “fair” bandwidth cap route. Right now, 5% of customers are 50%+ of the bandwidth. Putting a cap in place that charges those 5% extra would do one of two things: 1. generate more revenue from them or 2. cause them to leave. Either outcome is fine by the cable guys.
@JustThatGuy3:
I know that these issues can be opposed, and am fully aware of the various aspects of a-la-carte cable proposals. I was offering these simply as examples of issues that viewers and politicians could rally around. Also, I’m not saying that bandwidth caps are a net neutrality issue, but was using the latter as an example of a technical issue that doesn’t have much traction with the average user. My general point is that bandwidth capping, net neutrality, or other technical issues need to be better explained to non-technical consumers in ways which would compel them to demand what we all seem to want.
I haven’t had a TV for a while now, and I don’t miss it. We get cable through Comcast for an outrageously low price, simply because my husband asked the salesperson what discounts were available. It seems if you act like you may be going with the competition, they’ll do their best to get you to choose them. (Not that I haven’t had my share of problems with Comcast, but at least they resolve them within a day.) I don’t miss TV, because the Internet has all that TV has, plus the ablilty to filter out advertisements!
Dropped my cable 2 years ago. Now I rent movies through netflix, catch up on the occasional TV show online through Hulu or other sites, or rent an entire season of a tv show at once and watch it – free of commercials.
I dont miss cable one bit.
No. It’s about companies who are too cheap to invest in their own infrastructure, and would rather sell customers short.
Verizon understands that investing in its infrastructure will build its business naturally.
Many cable providers do not understand that notion and would rather tell customers they can only use so much bandwidth to save the money that should be spent on expansion.