I agree with all this, even the parts that disagree with me.
-b On April 27, 2014 at 20:30 jo...@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