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