What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

[bzs at world.std.com (Barry Shein)]

I agree with all this, even the parts that disagree with me.


   -b

On April 27, 2014 at 20:30 johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) wrote:
 > >That is, with CATV companies like HBO have to pay companies like
 > >Comcast for access to their cable subscribers.
 > 
 > Well, no.  According to Time-Warner's 2013 annual report, cable
 > companies paid T-W $4.89 billion for access to HBO and Cinemax.  No
 > video provider pays for access to cable.  The cruddy ones like home
 > shopping and 24/7 religion have small over the air stations and use
 > the must-carry rule, everyone else gets paid something, in the case of
 > ESPN quite a lot.  There's a reason that T-W bought HBO and Comcast
 > bought NBC, to capture all that money they'd been paying out.
 > 
 > There's two separate issues here: one is that the Internet is a
 > terrible way to deliver video.  The Internet part of your cable
 > connection is about 4 channels out of 500, and each of the other 496
 > is streaming high quality video.  That little bit of Internet is
 > designed for transactions (DNS, IM) and file transfer (mail and web),
 > not streaming, so when you do stream it is jittery and lossy.
 > Furthermore, nobody uses multicasting, if 400 customers on the same
 > cable system are watching Game of Thrones, there's 400 copies of it
 > cluttering up the tubes.
 > 
 > In a non-stupid world, the cable companies would do video on demand
 > through some combination of content caches at the head end or, for
 > popular stuff, encrypted midnight downloads to your DVR, and the
 > cablecos would split the revenue with content backends like Netflix.
 > But this world is mostly stupid, the cable companies never got VOD, so
 > you have companies like Netflix filling the gap with pessimized
 > technology.  (I do see that starting tomorrow, there will be a Netflix
 > channel on three small cablecos including RCN, delivered via TiVo,
 > although it's not clear if the delivery channel will change.)
 > 
 > The other issue is that due to regulatory failure, cable companies are
 > an oligopoly, and in most areas a local monopoly, so Comcast has the
 > muscle to shake down Internet video providers.  That's not a technical
 > problem, it's a political one.  In Europe, where DSL is a lot faster
 > than here, carriage and content are separate and there are a zillion
 > DSL providers.  We could do that here if the FCC weren't so spineless.
 > 
 > R's,
 > John