On 14-05-13 22:50, Daniel Staal wrote:
They have the money. They have the ability to get more money. *They see no reason to spend money making customers happy.* They can make more profit without it.
There is the issue of control over the market. But also the pressure from shareholders for continued growth. The problem with the internet is that while it had promises of wild growth in the 90s and 00s, once penetration reaches a certain level, growth stabilizes. When you combine this with threath to large incumbents's media and media distribution endeavours by the likes of Netflix (and cat videos on Youtube), large incumbents start thinking about how they will be able to continue to grow revenus/profits when customers will shift spending to vspecialty channels/cableTV to Netflix and customer growth will not compensate. So they seek new sources of revenues, and/or attempt to thwart competition any way they can. The current trend is to "if you can't fight them, jon them" where cablecos start to include the Netflix app into their proprietary set-top boxes. The idea is that you at least make the customer continue to use your box and your remote control which makes it easier for them to switch between netflix and legacy TV. Would be interesting to see if those cable companies that are agreeing to add the Netflix app onto their proprietary STBs also play peering capacity games to degrade the service or not.