AT&T Breaks Another Merger Promise In Making 'Friends' Exclusive

from the who-could-have-predicted-it dept

Last year AT&T defeated the DOJ's challenge to the company's $86 billion merger with Time Warner thanks to a comically narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon. At no point in his original 172-page ruling (which approved the deal without a single condition) did Leon show the faintest understanding that AT&T intends to use vertical integration synergistically with the death of net neutrality and neutered FCC oversight to dominate smaller competitors and tilt the entire internet ecosystem in its favor.

While the DOJ lost its original case, it was quick to appeal late last year, highlighting how within weeks of the deal AT&T had jacked up prices on consumers and competitors like Dish Network, which says it was forced to pull HBO from its lineup because it could no longer afford the higher rates.

Critics of the merger had also pointed out how AT&T would likely use the deal to increasingly make content exclusive to its own service, making it harder for competitors to access it. If you'll recall, this was something AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson also insisted wouldn't happen when addressing a Senate antitrust subcommittee pre-merger:

"Nor is there any reason to believe we could use Time Warner programming or AT&T networks to hurt related markets. Simply put, it would be irrational business behavior to do so. Time Warner's programming is more valuable when distributed to as many eyes as possible. Moreover, in order to have great programming, it is imperative that we attract great creative talent to develop it. The best way to attract that talent is through widespread distribution of Time Warner content."

Of course this week AT&T announced it would be taking content like Friends and making it exclusive to its own streaming platforms, including its new looming HBO Max service:

"AT&T will start restricting some Time Warner shows to its own streaming service, despite previously telling the government that it would distribute Time Warner content as widely as possible.

WarnerMedia, the division AT&T created when it bought Time Warner, today announced a new online streaming service called "HBO Max." HBO Max will debut in the spring of 2020 and include exclusives that will no longer be available on other streaming platforms."

On its surface this doesn't seem like that big of a deal. After all, Friends is an old show, and most users probably won't care. And it's certainly not the only show getting this treatment (Comcast NBC Universal just made The Office exclusive to its streaming platform, and Disney is also pulling Netflix content for exclusive use on its own looming Disney+ service). But more broadly, the more essential content AT&T makes exclusive to its own platform (especially and likely inevitably, HBO), the more difficult it will be to compete with AT&T. Knowing AT&T, there's going to be far more exclusives where this came from.

This is all before you even get to net neutrality and AT&T's domination in broadband, which has allowed it to behave anti-competitively in different, even more problematic ways (like only imposing arbitrary usage caps if you use a competitor's service). Letting companies like Comcast NBC Universal and AT&T Time Warner dominate both the conduit and the content will ultimately result in a universe of headaches for competitors and consumers alike. And Judge Leon's failure to see (or acknowledge) this will be a "gift" that keeps on giving for the next decade.

The other major problem these ongoing exclusives have is they increasingly force consumers to hunt and peck through a growing, cumbersome list of subscription services just to find the content they're looking for. And if subscription price and ease of use isn't managed carefully, it's simply going to drive frustrated users back to piracy. And when that happens, history suggests these companies will blame everybody and everything (ban VPNS!) but themselves for it.

All of that said, I'm not sure banning exclusive content deals is the answer. What would be at least part the answer for maintaining healthier markets? Finally realizing that endless media consolidation and mindless mega-mergers are generally harmful to the media and telecom sector (as now AT&T owned HBO and DC comics employees are just starting to figure out post merger). And that the long list of promises made in the ramp up to such super unions are almost always uniformly empty. There are fifty years of data for clear supporting evidence, especially in telecom.

Filed Under: content, friends, lies, mergers, promises, silos, streaming
Companies: at&t, hbo, netflix, time warner

Comcast Forgets To Delete Evidence It's Using Evil Fansubs In Its Streaming Service

from the oops dept

The war on fan-made subtitles waged by the entertainment industry has been going on for a long, long time. While fansubs could, and probably should, be viewed as a potential boon to the entertainment industry, allowing those in far-flung lands to suddenly enjoy its products, fansubs have instead been painted as an aid to pirated content overseas or, in some cases, as copyright infringement themselves, given that they essentially copy parts of the content scripts.

If nothing else is clear as a result of this introduction, it should be that major industry players absolutely hate fansubs.

... Except when they can make use of them, apparently, as Comcast-owned Swiss broadcaster Sky had been found using fansubs in its streaming service in the dumbest way possible.

Subscribers of the local Sky platform who watch the last episode of the hit series Chernobyl, with English subtitles enabled, see the following message appearing around the five-minute mark.

“- Synced and corrected by VitoSilans – www.Addic7ed.com.”

Addic7ed.com is a fansub site. Asked for comment, reps for the site said they didn't care at all that Sky was using their work. Instead, they claim to have started the site to get content out to more people so that specific language wasn't a barrier to enjoyment. Still, it must have been at least slightly jarring to see Sky essentially forget to strip out Addic7ed's signature for its own work. Using someone else's work as one's own by way of copying it is about as close an analogy to copyright infringement as one could get.

Sky, meanwhile, ain't talking.

Sky Switzerland hasn’t responded to our request for comment at the time of publication. Whether the Addic7ed credit was left in intentionally is highly doubtful though. It seems more likely that someone forgot to remove it.

In any case, the mention hasn’t gone unnoticed either. At least one person has alerted Sky via Twitter, but the company didn’t respond there either.

It's the hypocrisy here that's worth highlighting, because the industry regularly rails against fansub sites and here is a member of that industry using them in its own product.

Filed Under: copyright, fansubs, streaming
Companies: comcast, sky

Google Stadia Is About To Show Everyone Why Broadband Usage Caps Are Bullshit

from the running-straight-at-a-wall dept

We've noted for years how broadband providers have increasingly imposed arbitrary, confusing, and punitive usage caps and overage fees to cash in on the lack of competition in US broadband. Not only have industry executives admitted these limits aren't technically necessary, they've increasingly been abused to hamstring competitors. AT&T, for example, doesn't impose the limits on its broadband customers who use its streaming video service (DirecTV Now), but will impose the added charges if you use a competitor like Netflix.

For more than a decade ISPs have slowly but surely imposed such limits hoping that consumers wouldn't notice (think of the frog in the pot of boiling water metaphor with you as the frog). But as video streaming services have increasingly embraced high-bandwidth 4K streaming, consumer usage has started to collide with this arbitrary restrictions.

On the other hand, the rise of game streaming services like Google Stadia is going to blow right past these caps, finally highlighting the problem in stark detail. Services like Stadia eliminate the need for local gaming hardware, with all of the processing occurring in the cloud. The bandwidth consumption of these services will be fairly incredible:

"Google says that users who stream games at 720p, 1080p, or full 4K will eat through bandwidth at a rate of 4.5 GB, 9 GB, or 15.75 GB per hour, respectively.

Were you to stream Stadia games at full 4K, you’ll easily burn through a terabyte of data in less than three days. In the usage cap era, that’s a fairly obvious problem. Presumably, users would be looking at similar data usage for other upcoming streaming services.

Comcast, for example, imposes a 1 terabyte monthly cap on its users, who have the option of either buying buckets of additional data at $10 per 50 GB, or paying a flat fee of $50 (on top of their already high broadband bill) to remove the cap entirely. Using Google Stadia at full 4K resolution will blow through that cap in less than three days. And Comcast's 1 terabyte cap is among the more generous. Many DSL providers (like AT&T) impose usage caps as low as 150 GB a month. Many other rural ISPs have caps as low as 10 to 50 GB per month.

In the wake of the launch of Google Stadia (and other similar products from the likes of Microsoft) there's going to be a lot of surprised consumers with sore wallets. And that anger is only going to rejuvenate questions as to why these arbitrary and unnecessary limits exist (to make the telecom industry more money, duh) and why regulators have done absolutely nothing about what's a fairly obvious cash grab (regulatory capture and corruption, duh).

The other problem that we're going to face is on the net neutrality front. Many ISPs are developing their own cloud gaming platforms. Given the abuse of zero rating and usage caps in streaming video, it's very likely that ISPs will apply usage caps to customers who use competing gaming services but not their own, distorting the playing field, and harming innovation and competition. All told, it's going to be a crash course in why net neutrality is important, and why the recent tech policy fixation on "big tech" exclusively views the problems in tech through too narrow of a peephole.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, data caps, games, stadia, streaming, streaming games, video games
Companies: google

Streaming Services Far Exceed Traditional Cable in Customer Satisfaction

from the ain't-competition-grand dept

There's just something about terrible customer service, high prices, and sketchy quality product that consumers oddly don't like. American consumers' dislike of traditional cable TV providers was once again made clear this week in a study by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which, as its name implies, tracks US consumer approval of companies on a 100 point scale. As has long been the case, the full report shows most traditional cable TV, satellite, or IPTV providers languishing somewhere in the mid 60s -- scores that are bested by a long line of industries and government agencies (including the IRS).

Not too surprisingly, the report shows that American consumers far prefer streaming video alternatives, which provide them with lower costs and greater package flexibility. According to the ACSI, streaming services scored significantly higher than traditional TV, phone, broadband, video on demand, and wireless providers:

"Video streaming services are the top performers for customer satisfaction among the five telecom industries. Competition is likely to spur further improvement, with both Disney and Apple expected to release inexpensive streaming services later this year. Netflix gains 1% to secure first place at 79—and number one across all five telecom categories—after sharing the lead with Sony’s PlayStation Vue and Amazon Twitch last year. As its membership growth continues at a record pace, ACSI data show Netflix ranks at the top for original content among all streaming services."

The report's infographic makes the point clearer still:

Of course that's a major reason for the slow, steady exodus of cord cutters from traditional TV to streaming services or over the air antennas, the rate of which continues to accelerate. Streaming companies are actually trying to compete on things like price, which, with a few exceptions, still isn't something the traditional cable and broadcast industry is particularly interested in. Many sector executives spent the last decade pretending that this shift toward streaming was some kind of temporary fluke that would just magically dissipate.

As a result two sectors -- Pay-TV and broadband -- both had average satisfaction scores in the mid-sixties, the last place of all the industries the ACSI tracks. When you consider that includes the airline, banking, and insurance industries, that's no small feat.

Filed Under: customer satisfaction, streaming, tv

Disney Takes Full Control Of Hulu, Ending Years Of Managerial Schizophrenia

from the adapt-or-perish dept

For years we've noted how as a product of the cable and broadcast industry, Hulu spent many years going out of its way to avoid being truly disruptive. Past owners 21st Century Fox, AT&T, Disney and Comcast/NBC spent a lot of time ensuring the service wasn't too interesting -- lest it cannibalize the company's legacy cable TV cash cow. As a result, Hulu spent a good chunk of the last decade stuck in a sort of existential purgatory, with a rotating crop of execs trying to skirt the line between giving consumers what they actually want, and being a glorified ad for traditional cable television.

As cable and broadcast executives slowly realized that cord cutting was a threat that wasn't going away, things began to shift. More recently, owners like 21st Century Fox and AT&T have headed to the exits to focus on their own streaming efforts. That exodus continued this week with Comcast announcing it would be giving up full operational control of Hulu to Disney effective immediately.

You might recall that Comcast was banned from meddling in Hulu management as a condition of its 2011 merger with NBC/Universal, with regulators worried that the company would attempt to undermine Hulu to protect its traditional cable TV revenues. Comcast being Comcast, the company largely ignored those conditions, one of several reasons regulators balked at its attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable years later.

Under the terms of this new deal, Comcast has the option of selling its entire stake to Disney by 2024:

"Comcast also will be allowed to sell its 33% stake in Hulu to Disney in 2024 at a valuation of at least $27.5 billion, even if the streaming service is worth less, according to the agreement. Comcast is guaranteed at least $5.8 billion for its Hulu stake, according to the agreement.

As part of the deal, Disney has agreed to pay Comcast for its Hulu content for the next five years. NBC channels will be on Hulu Live at a higher rate than previously agreed. NBCUniversal, CNBC’s parent company, will also be able to run the same content on its own streaming service, which is expected to launch in next spring."

For the immediate future, this looks like a promising outcome for cord cutters. Hulu is finally freed from managers who really didn't much want the service to succeed because it might disrupt their own services. And while it's notably smaller than Netflix (137 million subscribers worldwide) and Amazon (100 million Prime subscribers), its 20 million-strong userbase puts it well ahead of numerous other emerging options like Dish's Sling TV and AT&T's DirecTV Now.

That said, the service isn't quite out of the woods yet. Researchers predict that every broadcaster in existence is likely to have its own streaming service on the market by 2022, and many of those companies will be eager to lock that content away in exclusivity silos, well away from competitors. And with Disney planning its own looming streaming service (Disney+) as a repository for its Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and kids programming, it's still possible that Disney eventually sees Hulu to be either redundant or a threat to those ambitions.

Filed Under: control, copyright, culture, piracy, streaming
Companies: comcast, disney, hulu

Despite Spielberg's 'Get Off My Lawn' Moment, The Oscars Won't Ban Netflix

from the protectionism-by-any-other-name dept

A few months back Steven Spielberg had a "get off my lawn" moment in demanding that films from Netflix and other streaming services be excluded from Oscar contention. The sentiment isn't uncommon among old-school Hollywood types who see traditional film as somehow so sacred that it shouldn't have to change or adapt in the face of technological evolution. It was the same sentiment recently exhibited by the Cannes film festival when they banned Netflix films because Netflix pushed back against absurd French film laws (which demand a 36-month delay between theatrical release and streaming availability).

We'll note that shortly after Spielberg's rant, he could be found pushing streaming services at Apple, which suggests a dash of...inconsistency in his arguments. Regardless, Academy members don't appear swayed by Spielberg's request, and have announced that current rules for Oscar contention will remain unchanged. More specifically the Academy will retain "rule two," which says a film is eligible to be considered for an Oscar so long as it has a seven-day run in an Los Angeles area theater. So sayeth the Academy:

"The Academy’s Board of Governors voted to maintain Rule Two, Eligibility for the 92nd Oscars. The rule states that to be eligible for awards consideration, a film must have a minimum seven-day theatrical run in a Los Angeles County commercial theater, with at least three screenings per day for paid admission. Motion pictures released in nontheatrical media on or after the first day of their Los Angeles County theatrical qualifying run remain eligible.

“We support the theatrical experience as integral to the art of motion pictures, and this weighed heavily in our discussions,” said Academy President John Bailey. “Our rules currently require theatrical exhibition, and also allow for a broad selection of films to be submitted for Oscars consideration. We plan to further study the profound changes occurring in our industry and continue discussions with our members about these issues."

Some of that was likely impacted by the DOJ's odd (given its apathy on countless antitrust issues across a universe of sectors) letter warning the Academy that such a ban might run afoul of antitrust enforcers.

Amusingly, the New York Times has subsequently published a piece largely fueled by anonymous friends of the director, attempting to strongly walk back Spielberg's original efforts to have streaming services banned from contention. The piece tries to suggest that Spielberg's opposition to streaming has been largely overhyped and misreported, despite his clear, documented preference for a rule change that would have kept services like Netflix from winning awards. In talking to the Times, Spielberg's anti-streaming positioning has softened dramatically:

"I want people to find their entertainment in any form or fashion that suits them,” Mr. Spielberg said in an email in response to queries from The New York Times. “Big screen, small screen — what really matters to me is a great story and everyone should have access to great stories.

“However, I feel people need to have the opportunity to leave the safe and familiar of their lives and go to a place where they can sit in the company of others and have a shared experience — cry together, laugh together, be afraid together — so that when it’s over they might feel a little less like strangers. I want to see the survival of movie theaters. I want the theatrical experience to remain relevant in our culture."

Sure, ok. The problem is that simply wanting to preserve the traditional brick and mortar film experience is one thing. Taking active, protectionist steps to prevent streaming competitors from winning awards or fairly competing with them is something else entirely. The consumer is driving this particular train, and if consumers ultimately decide they no longer want to go to a physical location and overpay for popcorn and sticky floors that's their prerogative. It's how competition, and evolution, works.

Filed Under: movies, oscars, steven spielberg, streaming
Companies: netflix

Ironically, Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

from the adapt-or-perish dept

To be very clear the rise in streaming video competitors is a very good thing. It's providing users with more choice, lower prices, and better customer service than consumers traditionally received from entrenched vanilla cable TV companies. It's the perfect example of how disruption and innovation are supposed to work. And given the abysmal customer satisfaction ratings of most big cable TV providers, this was an industry that's been absolutely begging for a disruptive kick in the ass since the 1980s.

But we've also noted that, ironically, the glut of video choices--more specifically the glut of streaming exclusivity silos--risks driving users back to piracy. Studies predict that every broadcaster and their uncle will have launched their own direct-to-consumer streaming platform by 2022. Most of these companies are understandably keen on locking their own content behind exclusivity paywalls, whether that's HBO Now's Game of Thrones, or CBS All Access's Stark Trek: Discovery.

But as consumers are forced to pay for more and more subscriptions to get all of the content they're looking for, they're not only getting frustrated by the growing costs (defeating the whole point of cutting the cord), they're frustrated by the experience of having to hunt and peck through an endlessly shifting sea of exclusivity arrangements and licensing deals that make it difficult to track where your favorite show or film resides this month.

In response, there's some early anecdotal data to suggest this is already happening. But because these companies are fixated on building market share, and this will likely be an industry-wide issue, most aren't seeing the problem yet.

Others are. The 13th edition of Deloitte’s annual Digital Media Trends survey makes it clear that too many options and shifting exclusivity arrangements are increasingly annoying paying customers:

But the plethora of options has a downside: Nearly half (47%) of U.S. consumers say they’re frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services required to watch what they want, according to the 13th edition of Deloitte’s annual Digital Media Trends survey. An even bigger pet peeve: 57% said they’re frustrated when content vanishes because rights to their favorite TV shows or movies have expired.

“Consumers want choice — but only up to a point,” said Kevin Westcott, Deloitte vice chairman and U.S. telecom and media and entertainment leader, who oversees the study. “We may be entering a time of ‘subscription fatigue.'”

As it turns out, people don't like Comcast, but they do ironically want a little more centralization than they're seeing in the streaming space. What that looks like isn't clear yet, but it's something that will slowly get built as some of the 300 options (and growing) currently available fail to gain traction in the space:

All told, there are more than 300 over-the-top video options in the U.S. With that fragmentation, there’s a clear opportunity for larger platforms to reaggregate these services in a way that can provide access across all sources and make recommendations based on all of someone’s interests, Westcott said. “Consumers are looking for less friction in the consumption process,” he said.

Variety's otherwise excellent report doesn't mention this, but a lot of these customers are going to revert to piracy. It's not clear why this isn't mentioned, but it's kind of standard practice for larger outlets to avoid mentioning piracy in the odd belief that acknowledging it somehow condones it. But if you don't mention it, you don't learn from it. You don't understand that piracy is best seen as just another competitor, and a useful tool to gain insight into what customers (studies repeatedly show pirates buy more content than most anybody else) really want.

It's easy to dismiss this as privileged whining ("poor baby is upset because they have too many choices), and that's certainly what a big segment of the market is going to do.

But it would be a mistake to ignore consumer frustration and the obviously annoying rise of endless exclusivity silos, given the effort it took to migrate users away from piracy and toward legitimate services in the first place. The primary lesson learned during that experience is you need to compete with piracy. It's not really a choice. It's real, it's impossible to stop, and the best way to mitigate it is to listen to your customers. Building more walled gardens, raising rates, and ignoring what subscribers want is the precise opposite of that.

Filed Under: piracy, streaming

DOJ Warns Academy That Being An Anti-Streaming Luddite Could Violate Antitrust

from the get-off-my-damn-lawn dept

So roughly a month ago you might recall that Steven Spielberg had a "get off my lawn" moment in demanding that Netflix films be excluded from Oscar contention. The sentiment isn't uncommon among old-school Hollywood types who see traditional film as somehow so sacred that it shouldn't have to change or adapt in the face of technological evolution. It was the same sentiment recently exhibited by the Cannes film festival when they banned Netflix films because Netflix pushed back against absurd French film laws (like the one requiring a 36-month delay between theatrical release and streaming availability).

You'll notice there's never much solid supporting evidence supporting these banning recommendations; just some vague arguments that films from streaming services can't be considered good because these companies push back against traditional and often counterproductive business tactics that haven't aged well in the internet era (like those antiquated release windows). And while Netflix's catalog certainly has its share of duds, there's an ocean of awards for films like Roma that suggest the entire sentiment is little more than old man protectionist nonsense.

Granted shortly after Spielberg's comments about how terrible streaming services were, Spielberg came out in breathless support of Apple's new undercooked Apple+ streaming service, suggesting that perhaps streaming services aren't so bad if Steven's backing them.

Curiously however, Steven's grumpy vision of a streaming-free oscars may not come to fruition. Reports this week surfaced that the Department of Justice has actually told the Academy to tread carefully in terms of excluding streaming services from contention, as they could run afoul of antitrust guidelines:

"According to a letter obtained by Variety, the chief of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, wrote to AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson on March 21 to express concerns that new rules would be written “in a way that tends to suppress competition.”

“In the event that the Academy — an association that includes multiple competitors in its membership — establishes certain eligibility requirements for the Oscars that eliminate competition without procompetitive justification, such conduct may raise antitrust concerns,” Delrahim wrote."

While that's actually makes some since for the DOJ, it's an odd issue to single out given all the other massive monopoly problems facing the US in the wake of years of eroded antitrust enforcement. After all, the DOJ just showed how feckless and toothless US antitrust protections are when it did a face plant in trying to stop AT&T's $86 billion merger with Time Warner, a deal that immediately resulted in significantly higher prices for both consumers and competitors alike.

So while the DOJ is correct in that the barring of Netflix and other streaming platforms from streaming contention is idiotic and anti-competitive, it's an interesting problem to be singling out given how useless and apathetic US antitrust enforcement has been on a wide variety of monopoly problems facing the US tech sector, from the cornering of ad markets to the vertical integration issues caused by telecom giants controlling both the content and the conduit to the home.

Filed Under: academy awards, doj, hollywood, movies, oscars, steven spielberg, streaming
Companies: apple, netflix

Comcast's New Rented Streaming Box Is A Flimsy Attempt To Remain Relevant

from the beautiful-walled-gardens dept

Like countless other cable giants, Comcast continues to bleed cable TV subscribers at an alarming rate. These users, tired of sky-high prices, continue to flee to more competitive streaming alternatives and better customer service. That's not great news for Comcast, which has spent decades enjoying a stranglehold over traditional TV, thanks in part to the industry's walled gardens and monopoly over the cable box. And while cable giants could counter the streaming threat by competing on price, they instead continue to double down on ideas that don't make a whole lot of sense.

Case in point: in a bid to try and keep users from "cutting the cord," Comcast last week introduced Xfinity Flex. According to the Comcast press release, this new Flex streaming box will be made available to existing Comcast broadband customers for a $5 monthly rental fee, providing access to a limited number of streaming services (sans live streaming services like Playstation Vue, SlingTV, or DirecTV Now that directly compete with Comcast's own offerings):

"Xfinity Flex will deepen our relationship with a certain segment of our Internet customers and provide them with real value,” said Matt Strauss, Executive Vice President, Xfinity Services for Comcast Cable. “For just five dollars a month, we can offer these customers an affordable, flexible, and differentiated platform that includes thousands of free movies and shows for online streaming, an integrated guide for accessing their favorite apps and connected home devices, and the ease of navigating and managing all of it with our voice remote."

Except the "value" provided by Comcast's latest effort is dubious at best. For one, Comcast's new hardware will only allow users to view a handful of curated streaming services and apps chosen and approved by Comcast. Why, exactly, would users, who could pay a one-time flat fee for Roku or build a media center PC (with an endless roster of apps and services), want to instead pay the least liked company in America an additional $5 per month for a box that's highly restricted?

Another caveat: this being the cable company, that $5 isn't actually $5. While Comcast rather buries this fact, the company's ads make it clear that to order get Flex, you can't have your own router, but have to also rent Comcast's XFi Gateway for an additional $10-13 per month:

In short, Comcast's $5 rental box is actually closer to a $15 rented box that doesn't provide access to the full litany of streaming services. But as is usually the case, the mainstream tech press kind of missed all of that. Comcast-owned CNBC, for example, was quick to claim in a write up of the device that Comcast was somehow "making it easier" for the company's subscribers:

"Comcast is making it easier for its broadband-only customers to access streaming video without an outside set-top box..."

Except that's not at all what Comcast is doing here. The entire affair is Comcast desperately trying to seem innovative, when in reality it's just attempting to erect barriers and keep customers inside its increasingly-irrelevant walled gardens. Customers don't want to rent another Comcast-requested cable box, and given the wide variety of streaming hardware for sale, they shouldn't.

Trying to keep customers on Comcast-approved hardware is going to prove to be a fool's errand. Comcast's real ace in the hole in terms of battling cord cutting won't be hardware, but the company's growing monopoly over broadband in many markets. This dwindling competition is letting Comcast erect arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees. Fees that will apply to competing services but not to Comcast's own TV content, giving it a wonderful way to not just raise rates, but to use its power as network operator to disadvantage streaming providers in the absence of net neutrality rules.

Filed Under: cable, streaming, tv, xfinity flex
Companies: comcast

Slow Broadband, Usage Caps Could Mar Google Stadia's Game Streaming Ambitions

from the ill-communication dept

I can remember being at E3 in 2000 and being pitched on the idea of a sort of "dumb terminal" for gaming. As in, you wouldn't need a computer or game console in your home, since all of the actual game processing would be accomplished in the cloud then streamed to your TV via broadband. Most of these early pitches never materialized. Initially because cloud computing simply wasn't fully baked yet, but also thanks to America' shoddy broadband.

Cloud-based game streaming is something the industry has continued to push for, though nobody has yet to truly crack the market. Onlive probably tried the hardest, though again a lack of real cloud horsepower and sketchy residential broadband prevented the service from truly taking off.

Undaunted, Google took to the stage at the Game Developers Conference to unveil Stadia, a looming game streaming platform that will let gamers play top-shelf games on any hardware with a Chrome browser. Google insists that the service, when it launches this summer, will be able to drive games at up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second seamlessly between multiple devices with no need for game consoles, high-end PCs, loading times, or installs. The whole presentation is available here:

If anybody can make the idea work it's certainly Google, whose massive transit and cloud computing firepower should give it a leg up on past efforts. Unfortunately for Google, the service still faces a daunting foe. One Google has previously tried and failed to disrupt: the shoddy state of US broadband:

"Generally, streaming a game at 1080p requires latency of less than 20ms and downstream speeds of at least 25 Mbps. But raw throughput is just one of numerous factors that can impact the responsiveness of game streaming. Upstream speeds, the quality of your router, and even congestion at internet peering and interconnection points can impact game play.

Google hopes to sidestep some of this by having the lion’s share of the streaming traffic travel over its own datacenter and transit links. But that data still needs to make its way to your home via the “last mile,” or your ISP. And if your ISP is terrible, your Google Stadia experience is likely to mirror that reality."

In addition to slow speeds (thanks to countless US telcos that refuse to upgrade their networks), Google's new service will also need to contend with the bullshit, arbitrary usage caps and overage fees giants like Comcast have been imposing on their networks in the wake of little to no real competition. While there are not many services that can blow through Comcast's 1 terabyte cap ($10 per each additional 50 gigabytes thereafter), streaming games at 4K or 8K certainly will. Many ISPs, especially slower telcos, impose usage caps that are far less generous.

The other issue to keep an eye on will be net neutrality. ISPs like Verizon are working on their own game streaming services. Given that incumbent ISPs are already removing usage caps if you use their own video streaming service, there's really not much stopping an ISP from doing the same thing with gaming. It's the culmination of a vision telecom giants like Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T have had for years, where they impose arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions and caveats to simultaneously cash in on--and disadvantage--companies they want to directly compete with. If you can't win, cheat.

Given its cloud firepower Google can certainly pull the idea off. And if Google doesn't, somebody else will. Replacing high-end PCs and pricey game consoles with a simple cloud-based, multi-device game streaming subscription service seems like the obvious next step. But the process is going to once again shine a light on how the broken, monopoly-dominated telecom sector has some very real problems tech refuses to address and fix. Problems that harm not only the public, but countless attempts to innovate and disrupt other, existing sectors. Game streaming is going to shine a very bright light on this reality.

Filed Under: broadband, cloud gaming, competition, stadia, streaming, video games
Companies: at&t, google, verizon