Mexico Reverses Ban On Selling Roku Hardware After Absurd Piracy Ruling

from the closed-platforms dept

So just about a year ago the Mexican court system decided to ban all Roku streaming hardware from being sold in Mexico. The ban was the result of legal action taken by Mexican cable company Cablevision, which accused Roku of facilitating piracy. How? While Roku devices are more locked down than many of the more open home media PC solutions (also the target of endless pearl clutching and hyperventilation by the entertainment industry), users can install certain unofficial, third-party "private" channels that provide access to pirated live streams of cable content.

While Roku went out of its way to try and lock down their hardware, some users paid hackers a few bucks to crack open and modify the devices anyway, letting them access the dubious third-party channels in question. While this obviously wasn't Roku's fault, Cablevision believed Roku should be punished for the behavior of the company's customers, and declared it was doing Mexican consumers a public service:

"Cablevision cannot allow the content that it licenses from domestic and foreign companies to be illegally used,” Cablevision spokeswoman Maria Eugenia Zurita told Reuters via email. “We would also like Roku Inc to better supervise the use of its software so that it’s not used inappropriately."

Roku quickly appealed, and while a federal judge initially overturned the ban, a subsequent ruling restored it, so the ban has been in place for the better part of the year, costing Roku a notable sum. Roku subsequently jumped through all manner of hoops in a bid to please the courts, including building a new internal team specifically dedicated to cracking down on piracy, posting notable warnings to users who decide to install unofficial channels, and renaming the channels from "private" to "non-certified" in a bid to make it even more obvious Roku wasn't sanctioning the behavior of its users.

Fast forward to this week, and the 11th Collegiate Court in Mexico City has ruled to again overturn the ban, opening the door to Mexican consumers being able to, you know, buy whatever hardware they like and use the devices as they see fit.

"The Court reportedly acknowledged Roku’s efforts to keep pirated content away from its platform, an opinion also shared by Cablevision. However, should pirate channels appear on Roku in the future, Cablevision warned that it would take further legal action to have those sources blocked via the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property and other local authorities."

Again, consumers are just using a computer to access content online, and what that content is really shouldn't really be seen as Roku's responsibility. The irony here is that Roku has spent a lot of time kissing up to entrenched cable operators here in the States, helping them scuttle efforts to make traditional cable boxes more open. Of course much like the cable industry, the more locked down Roku makes its products, the more likely consumers are to flock to products that actually let them do what they want, which obviously doesn't necessarily include piracy.

The same hysteria surrounding Roku has been doubly-applied to programs like Kodi, which (in much the same way that Roku is just a computer) is just software that (with the help of plugins) can be used to access copyrighted content... and a laundry list of other things. This nannyish approach to what hardware and software can be used and how is an unproductive and expensive game of Whac-a-Mole, which is why we've pretty consistently argued that embracing openness and innovation tends to be a notably more productive and profitable solution.

Filed Under: bans, copyright, hardware, mexico, piracy, streaming
Companies: roku

Streaming Exclusives Will Drive Users Back To Piracy And The Industry Is Largely Oblivious

from the history-repeats-itself dept

As you probably have noticed, there's a growing tide of streaming video services popping up to feed users who want a cheaper, more flexible alternative to traditional cable. By and large this has been a very good thing. It's finally driving some competition for bumbling apathetic giants like Comcast, forcing them to at least make a feeble effort to improve customer service. It also reflects a belated admission by the broadcast industry that you need to compete with piracy (instead of say, suing the entire planet and hoping it goes away) by offering users access to cheaper, flexible viewing options.

But the gold rush into streaming has come with a few downsides. Studies have suggested that every broadcaster on the planet will likely have their own streaming service by 2022. In a bid to drive more subscribers to their service, said broadcasters are increasingly developing their own content, or striking their own content exclusivity deals, and then locking that content in an exclusivity silo. For example, if you want to watch Star Trek: Discovery, you need to shell out $6 a month for CBS All Access. Can't miss House of Cards? You'll need Netflix. Bosch? Amazon Prime. The Handmaid's Tale? Hulu.

Again, on its face this impulse makes perfect sense: you want the kind of content that drives users to your platform. And at first it wasn't all that noticeable, because there were only a handful of services. Even if you subscribed to four of them, you still probably were saving money over your traditional cable bill.

The problem is, as more and more companies jump into the streaming market, users are being forced to subscribe to an ocean of discordant services to get access for the content they're looking for. As users are forced to pony up more and more cash for more and more services, it's going to start defeating the purpose of ditching over-priced, traditional cable. But instead of going back to cable, back in March we noted how users are just as likely to consider piracy.

And of course that's already starting to happen, with BitTorrent usage seeing some modest but notable bumps, especially overseas. It's minor now, but if you've paid attention to several decades of piracy precedent, it's not hard to predict the outcome of this rush to cordon off everything into far too many exclusivity silos. Disney, for example, is preparing to pull all of its best content off of Netflix (Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel) and make it exclusive to its own streaming platform. In the wake of its acquisition of Time Warner, AT&T is contemplating doing the same thing with old episodes of shows like Friends. You may have noticed a trend:

"Before Netflix got into the Original series game, it made a name for itself by licensing content from other distributors like Warner Bros. TV, Paramount Television, and NBC Universal Television. Licensing deals are great for fans who don’t have cable or are looking to discover new series in full, but now that streaming is king, distributors and production companies have realized that they can make more money by consolidating their content on a single streaming service — hence why Disney, WarnerMedia, DC, and other media companies are creating their own platforms with original content."

You'd be pretty hard pressed to find many people in the streaming or broadcast sector who realize the pitfalls of this gold rush toward streaming exclusivity, even after all of the painful piracy and gatekeeper lessons learned thus far. After all, most industry executives are right that having must-watch exclusive content is necessary to drive subscriber adoption, and that developing original content in house is a better financial proposition than skyrocketing broadcast licensing costs. But few have paused, taken a step back, and considered how the rush to exclusivity at scale could come back to bite the sector at large.

That's thanks, in part, to the weird aversion among most journalists and analysts to even mention piracy in their reports or stories. Most reporters and analysts see even mentioning piracy as some kind of bizarre cardinal sin that implies they somehow advocate for the behavior. This tendency to ignore the elephant in the room is a major reason the industry has such a hard time learning that you have to compete with piracy, not engage in idiotic, counter-productive and often harmful attempts to "cure" it with legislation, lawyers, or an endless parade of terrible ideas.

The old adage that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it will likely hold true here. If the current trend holds, by 2022 consumers will be forced to subscribe to an absolute universe of $10 to $15 per month services just to get all the content they're looking for, on the presumption the average household has an unlimited amount of disposable income.

If history is any indication, it will take another year or two for the industry to identify and admit this exclusivity parade is driving users back to piracy. At that point, they'll probably burn through a rotating crop of "solutions" (like waging war on password sharing), before coming to this central conclusion: that licensing your content to a sensible but not overwhelming crop of companies actually good at the technical and customer service aspects of streaming (like, Netflix) -- instead of everybody and their mother launching their own streaming product -- wasn't such a terrible idea after all.

Filed Under: copyright, exclusives, piracy, silos, streaming

Some Apple Employees Think Company's New TV Service Will Be Dull As Nails

from the more-of-the-same dept

Like many companies, Apple has been trying to disrupt the traditional television sector for years. But like countless companies before it, Apple has repeatedly run face-first into a cable and broadcast industry that's aggressively resistant to actual change. As a result, Apple's efforts to launch a TV service have been comically delayed for years as cable and broadcast companies (worried that what Apple did to the music industry would also happen to the TV sector) tightly restricted how their content could be used if the approach varies too far from accepted industry norms.

So despite Steve Jobs insisting that Apple had "cracked the code" on a next-gen TV set as early as 2011 -- and efforts to strike licensing deals that have been ongoing since at least 2012 -- nothing much has really come from Apple's promised revolution on the television front.

In the years since, numerous streaming providers (Dish's Sling TV, AT&T's DirecTV Now, Sony's Playstation Vue) have jumped into the sector, and Apple is definitely a late arrival. As such, the looming TV service Apple appears poised to launch seems to be very much a derivative offering that isn't likely to disrupt the sector all that much. A report in the Wall Street Journal (paywall, see Gizmodo's alt. take) notes that Apple has set aside $1 billion for original programming, but Tim Cook's fears that the service could tarnish Apple's pure brand image appear to be causing some notable problems.

The report noted how at least one project fled to Amazon after Apple tried to tightly restrict the show's political commentary. And the kind of comically inconsistent restrictions that tend to plague Apple's app store appear to have made their way to the company's looming TV service, including a ban on, of all things, crosses:

"Apple signed a deal for a series made by M. Night Shyamalan about a couple who lose a young child.

Before saying yes to that psychological thriller, Apple executives had a request: Please eliminate the crucifixes in the couple’s house, said people working on the project. They said executives made clear they didn’t want shows that venture into religious subjects or politics. Mr. Shyamalan wasn’t available for comment.

Of course that's the exact opposite tack taken by streaming providers like Netflix or Amazon, which have increasingly turned to original, more edgy fare to help set themselves apart from the traditional networks. As a long list of recent awards make pretty clear, that approach is certainly working out ok. Given Apple's more cautious approach, some employees have taken to making fun of the looming service:

"One agent said some members of Apple’s team in Los Angeles began calling themselves “expensive NBC."

Of course this being Apple, it's entirely possible that nobody cares that Apple's original content lineup lacks any rough edges, and fans are likely to line up and buy the product anyway. It's also certainly possible to create a high-quality platform with largely G-rated fare. That said, this sounds nothing like the TV revolution Apple has promised for the better part of the last decade, and too much interference with the creative process isn't likely to help keep talent around as Apple's never-ending quest to upend the TV apple cart stumbles forward.

Filed Under: over the top, streaming, tv
Companies: apple

Thanks To Streaming Fragmentation, Bittorrent Traffic Is Suddenly Rising In Traffic Share

from the equal-and-opposite-reaction dept

When it comes to the type of traffic the content industries are worried about regarding piracy, the present is no longer the past. You can see this in many ways, such as anti-piracy efforts largely focusing on illicit streaming sites, the trend in laws and takedown notices also targeting streaming sites, and the overall messaging coming out of the copyright industries about how evil streaming sites are with little distinction between the legal and illegal. All of this has been built in part on the realization that bittorrent traffic, the piracy metric of a decade ago, has been steadily dropping in its traffic market share for several years. Combined with a drastic rise in streaming traffic share, the takeaway was that pirates weren't downloading any longer and were instead streaming.

The other side of that conversation is how good, convenient streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have taken away some of the impulse for copyright infringement as well. It turns out that if you give the public access to what they want at a reasonable price and make the content easy to get, there's no longer a need to pirate that content. Who knew?

Unfortunately, the past few years have seen a drastic fragmentation of the streaming market. Where there was once the need to essentially have one or two streaming services to get most of the content you want, exclusivity deals and homegrown content created by the streaming companies themselves has carved out more borders in the streaming services industry, often times requiring many streaming services to get the content people now want. And, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine is reporting that bittorrent traffic is suddenly on the rise.

Globally, across both mobile and fixed access networks file-sharing accounts for 3% of downstream and 22% of upstream traffic. More than 97% of this upstream is BitTorrent, which makes it the dominant P2P force. In the EMEA region, which covers Europe, the Middle East, and Africa there’s a clear upward trend. BitTorrent traffic now accounts for 32% of all upstream traffic. This means that roughly a third of all uploads are torrent-related.

Keep in mind that overall bandwidth usage per household also increased during this period, which means that the volume of BitTorrent traffic grew even more aggressively.

That trend is being mirrored in other regions around the world as well. Once thought to be the declining method for filesharing, bittorrent is suddenly making a traffic comeback. And the reason is the fragmentation in the streaming marketplace. Again, there are both real dollar costs and mental transaction costs that come along with signing up for multiple streaming services. Asking a person to subscribe to 3-6 streaming services to get the kind of content package that is now the norm is no different than a bulky cable bill with multiple and complicated packages. In addition, this streaming service bloat also mirrors what cord-cutters have been running away from for years, which is the cost associated with access to all kinds of content the customer has no interest in. In other words, the streaming industry risks making the exact same mistake the cable industry made with the exact same result in pushing people to pirate content.

And it's not just me saying so. Sandvine's report reaches the same conclusion.

“More sources than ever are producing ‘exclusive’ content available on a single streaming or broadcast service – think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryan for Amazon. To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer, so they subscribe to one or two and pirate the rest.

“Since these numbers were taken in June for this edition, there were no Game of Thrones episodes coming out, so consider these numbers depressed from peak!” Cullen notes.

None of this is to say that streaming and content companies can't produce exclusive content, or that every content creator should make their content available on every streaming platform. However, when the bittorrent traffic picks up, the industry also can't simply fall back on the "everybody just wants everything for free!" tired mantra that's been trotted out so often in the past. It's a direct result of the fragmentation, which is a business model issue.

Filed Under: content, copyright, exclusivity, piracy, silos, streaming
Companies: amazon, hbo, hulu, netflix

ESPN Has Finally Realized This Whole Streaming Thing Has Legs

from the go-figure dept

ESPN has personified the cable and broadcast industry's tone deafness to cord cutting and TV market evolution. Executives not only spent years downplaying the trend as something only poor people do, it sued companies that attempted to offer consumers greater flexibility in how video content was consumed. ESPN execs clearly believed cord cutting was little more than a fad that would simply stop once Millennials started procreating, and ignored surveys showing how 56% of consumers would ditch ESPN in a heartbeat if it meant saving the $8 per month subscribers pay for the channel.

As the data began to indicate the cord cutting trend was very real, ESPN's first impulse was often to try and shoot the messenger. Meanwhile, execs doubled down on bloated sports licensing deals and SportsCenter set redesigns, pretty clearly unaware that the entire TV landscape was shifting beneath their feet.

By the time ESPN had lost 10 million viewers in just a few years, the company was busy pretending they saw cord cutting coming all the while. ESPN subsequently decided the only solution was to fire hundreds of longstanding sports journalists and support personnel, but not the executives like John Skipper (since resigned for other reasons) whose myopia made ESPN's problems that much worse.

Ultimately, ESPN and Disney figured out that streaming was the future. In response, it launched a new direct-to consumer app dubbed ESPN+ that sort of gave users what they wanted, but not really. The $5 per month service basically took much of the fare available on ESPN's lesser-watched channels and offered it over the internet. But there were caveats; such as the service didn't really offer users what they really wanted (just a streaming version of ESPN's core channel) unless you subscribe to traditional cable, part of the "TV Everywhere" mindset cable execs can't seem to move past.

Even then, the service still managed to gobble up more than a million subscribers in just over five months, a fact ESPN was quick to highlight in a press statement about the milestone:

"Reaching one million paid subscribers is an important milestone for any video subscription service, but reaching this benchmark in such a short amount of time is an incredible testament to the teams from DTCI and ESPN who have worked tirelessly to bring this product to market and continually improve it since our April launch,” said Kevin Mayer, chairman, Direct-to-Consumer and International, The Walt Disney Company. “We’re thrilled so many sports fans have quickly come to love the service. The future is bright and we believe growth will continue as we add features, distribution partners and more exclusive content in the coming months."

While better late than never, you have to think ESPN would have far more than a million subscribers by now if execs had actually paid attention to the market they inhabit. And while ESPN+ is making progress, ESPN still finds itself between a rock and a hard place in terms of providing users what they actually want (again, just a streaming version of ESPN). In short, if ESPN offers a standalone version of ESPN, it only encourages customers to cut the cord and move to less expensive (and less profitable) alternatives. If ESPN doesn't give customers what they want, they'll cut the cord out of frustration.

That said, you'd rather be out ahead of a major paradigm shift than trailing behind, a lesson ESPN execs seem to be slowly but steadily learning.

Filed Under: cord cutting, internet, sports, streaming
Companies: espn

Evidence Mounts: UK Study Shows Better Legal Alternatives Pushing Pirates To Become Customers

from the yarrrr-forget-it dept

The theory that piracy enforcement is a far inferior method for combating copyright infringement when compared with better and innovative business models and offerings is certainly old hat for us here. And, while there have certainly been studies going back years showing that to be the case, it seems notable that the past few months have seen a wave of these studies all coming on top of each other. We had MUSO, of all organizations, essentially concluding a survey it did in the UK showing how much content "pirates" actually buy legitimately by saying, "Hey, content industries, get your shit together!" That was followed quite recently by a study performed by Dutch researchers that did an amazing and large-sampled survey that concluded quite clearly that user-friendly legal alternatives depressed piracy rates at a far greater clip than enforcement measures.

And, now, because good things always come in threes, yet another study in the UK has shown that once-pirates of music are morphing into very real customers due to convenient and user-friendly streaming services.

A new report from market research and data analytics firm YouGov only adds weight to that apparent shift. The headline stat from the company’s Music Report is that just one in ten Brits are currently downloading music illegally. That’s down from almost double (18%) that figure five short years ago.

It's quite obvious what coincides with that time period of the past five years that could contribute to this reduction in piracy and sure as hell isn't anything in the enforcement arena. Instead, the YouGov study suggests that the streaming services so many in the music industry have tried desperately to torpedo are responsible for this reduction. And, more interestingly, the report suggests that the trend line is only going to continue, if not accelerate.

More than six out of ten (63%) illegal music downloaders predict they’ll still be pirating in five years’ time but a significant 22% believe they won’t. Just over a third (36%) acknowledge that using unofficial sources for music is becoming more difficult but the summary doesn’t offer reasons why.

“It is now easier to stream music than to pirate it. And the cost is not prohibitive,” one respondent said. “Spotify has everything from new releases to old songs, it filled the vacuum, there was no longer a need for using [an] unverified source,” added another.

In other words, innovators solved the music piracy problem in the UK, as we always said would happen. John Marshall, the associate director at YouGov, was even more explicit in his conclusions, essentially stating that the public was now satisfied with streaming services and mostly had no use for piracy.

All of this is not to say that the music industry doesn't still have jobs in peril, of course. It's just that those jobs appear to be the ones involved in copyright enforcement, while the business of music itself should be doing quite well.

Filed Under: copyright, customers, licensed services, piracy, streaming, uk

Progress Isn't Linear: YouTube TV's World Cup Flub Threatens Public's Trust For Sports Streaming

from the cup-up dept

As we've pointed out any number of times over the past few years, cord-cutting is a very real thing and represents a threat to the cable television industry as it exists today. One of the last threads from which that industry largely hangs is professional sports broadcasts, with cable network providers having traditionally locked up pro and college sports broadcast rights in long-term exclusive deals. That has slowly begun to change, as the leagues of the world have finally gotten on board with streaming providers big and small, connected to the cable industry or not. If this is adopted en masse, it puts disruptive change for cable on the horizon.

But progress isn't linear and one of the threats to keeping this train on its tracks is the quality of the experience for users that dive into these sports streaming options. Especially early on in this kind of change, providers getting things right is extremely important, as reputations and public perception of the viability of sports streaming are more than somewhat on the line. And YouTube recently botched its broadcast of the World Cup match between England and Croatia.

In the middle of Wednesday's World Cup semifinal match between England and Croatia, YouTube's live TV service suffered an unfortunately-timed outage (not unlike ones we've seen from Sling or Hulu). Naturally, it enraged YouTube TV subscribers who had picked up the service specifically to catch live broadcasts like that game, and now it's offering an apology in the form of a credit.

There are several unfortunate factors at play for why this specific screw-up is worse for the reputation of sports streaming than it might have been otherwise. We can start with the most obvious factor: this is YouTube we're talking about. Look, there are plenty of good streaming service providers out there, but YouTube is the king of them, by reputation if not by fact. Having that name tied to this screw up is likely to register with the public as an indication that streaming for sports may not be ready for prime time.

The second factor: this was the World Cup we're talking about. The popularity of this event, and its related viewership, is immense. The public knows that. Any streaming service for World Cup broadcasts has to know that its service is going to be heavily trafficked and ought to have its shit in order to accommodate the event's popularity. Heavy viewerships shouldn't be a surprise and, whatever the actual cause of YouTube's interruption, it will be assumed by most that viewership load played a factor.

Now, as the post notes, streaming interruptions have happened before and they will happen again. Much of the reaction to what I outlined above will be at least in part unfair. But if you're rooting for sports streaming to erupt in popularity, or if you're a streaming provider trying to get more leagues on board, this kind of a screw up was about as bad in terms of timing as it gets.

Filed Under: football, live streaming, soccer, streaming, world cup
Companies: youtube

Over The Top Sports Streaming Comes To Europe With Amazon's Deal With The Premier League

from the it's-spreading dept

We've made the point repeatedly that one of the last and most important threads on which the current cable television industry is hanging is that of live sports. While cord-cutting is indeed a thing, the many broadcast agreements pro and major college sports leagues have with cable broadcast partners keeps the cord-cutting from becoming a deluge from a burst dam. That being said, small but important steps have begun with many leagues, which are finally recognizing the demand viewers have for over the top streaming options. While there are still far too many restrictions in these sports streaming options, there is no doubt that American sports leagues have begun snipping away at this thread for cable television.

And now it this practice is coming to Europe as well. Specifically, Amazon has secured a relatively small but massively important streaming broadcast agreement for Premier League soccer.

Amazon has scored the rights to stream Premier League football (soccer) matches in the UK for three years. It’s the first time that Brits will be able to watch a full day of games on a streaming-only service, and Amazon will offer 20 games next season to Prime subscribers at no extra cost. Amazon has secured one of the smaller packages of Premier League games, but an important one over the festive period. Prime subscribers will get access to the first midweek December games rather than the big weekend fixtures, and Amazon will also be streaming all of the festive Boxing Day fixtures.

“This will be the first time a full round of Premier League fixtures will be broadcast live in the UK,” notes Amazon. It’s a deal that will mean British football fans will need to have an Amazon Prime subscription to watch any Boxing Day matches live. Boxing Day is a public holiday in the UK, and it’s a big day of football matches. It’s also the day after Christmas Day, when most British football fans will sit around in their pajamas and feast on leftover Christmas dinner food and watch matches live.

The plans Amazon has for this specific broadcast agreement obviously revolve around more than just revenue from the matches themselves. The timing of the games is key, centered around the post-Christmas holiday. Amazon will be pushing the public to sign up for Amazon Prime so that they can stream these games, while at the same time pushing those same customers to do their holiday shopping on Amazon as well. It's a way to gobble up marketshare in a fairly ingenious way.

But the greater overall effect could be on the cable industry in Europe. Imagine if the viewership numbers for these streaming games compares favorably to broadcast cable television numbers. Suddenly, the Premier League will have found a brand new partner to show its games, one that is motivated by more than just selling advertising during commercial breaks. There's a synergy there that cable TV simply can't have. And, of course, the public would have far less use for cable TV if it can get its sports via streaming.

This trend has and will continue. And it doesn't look good for the cable industry.

Filed Under: eu, football, sports, streaming, streaming sports
Companies: amazon, premier league

Comcast's Wireless Service Will Charge You More To Stream HD Video

from the arbitrary-constructs dept

A few years back, wireless carriers began flirting with a new idea: throttling all video by default, then charging you additional money if you wanted to view video as actually intended. You'll probably recall that T-Mobile spearheaded this effort, and wasn't particularly honest about what it was doing. You might also recall that Sprint began throttling all video to 1.5 Mbps, all games to speeds "up to 2 Mbps" and all music streams to speeds "up to 500 Kbps." Fortunately for you, you could avoid dealing with this arbitrary restrictions if you were willing to pay Sprint an additional $25 per month:

"This plan provides a premium quality mobile streaming experience with HD streaming videos at up to 1080p+, HD music streaming at up to 1.5 Mbps and streaming gaming at up to 8 Mbps."

Reddit users note that Comcast is now following suit for its own Xfinity Mobile wireless service. The service leans primarily on Comcast's network of WiFi hotspots and Verizon's cellular network, promising users "unlimited" data for $45 per line (plus various fees). As is usually the case in wireless, Comcast's definition of "unlimited" means around 20 GB, after which your connection is throttled to 1.5 Mbps download and 750 Kbps upload. Now, according to Reddit users, the company has also started throttling video on this service back to 480p, with plans to begin charging you more if you want actual HD:

"To help you conserve data, we've established 480p as the standard resolution for streaming video through cellular data. This can help you save money if you pay By the Gig and take longer to reach the 20 GB threshold if you have the Unlimited data option. Later this year, 720p video over cellular data will be available as a fee-based option with your service. In the meantime, you can request it on an interim basis at no charge.

In other words, by "unlimited" Comcast really means 20 GB on a connection incapable of delivering HD video unless you pay more money. As an added, new restriction, Comcast is also now throttling all tethered hotspots on these "unlimited" connections to 600 kbps--unless you sign up for the company's pay per gigabyte option at a whopping $12 per gigabyte. This is, apparently, Comcast's version of what it looks like when you try and disrupt and compete with the broader wireless industry.

On its face this isn't the end of the world. On a small mobile phone screen, the difference between 480p and 720p will likely be unnoticable to many users. It's the precedent that's being set that's more troubling. For one, this continues to be a bastardization of the term "unlimited," a word the telecom sector has abused for the better part of the last decade without learning any real lessons. And with net neutrality rules now on the cutting room floor, throttling video, music and games (unless you pay more) isn't too far of a leap from theoretical scenarios like this one:

Again, with a net neutrality court challenge looming, ISPs are going to try and be on their best behavior to avoid providing any ammunition to the opposition. But with anti-competitiveness in their marrow, they're going to find it irresistible to try and push the envelope when it comes to creative new ways to raise rates on the end user. On the surface many of these efforts may not seem all that terrible, but like the boiling frog metaphor these baby steps will all cumulatively result in a decidedly-unpleasant online experience, and which arbitrary limits and caveats we're willing to accept is going to matter over the longer haul.

Filed Under: competition, net neutrality, streaming, throttling, unlimited
Companies: comcast