At 11:39 PM 7/12/2014, Steven Tardy wrote:
How would "4U of rent" and 500W($50) electricity *not* save money?
Because, on top of that, we'd have huge bandwidth expenses. And Netflix would refuse to cover any of that out of the billions in fees it's collecting from subscribers. We can't raise our prices (that would not only cost us customers but be unfair to many of them; it would be forcing the non-Netflix users to subsidize Netflix). We simply need Netflix to pay at least some of its freight.
If your ISP isn't tall enough for Netflix, Akamai has a lower barrier of entry. Have you let Akamai give you a local cache? why or why not?
Akamai refused to do so when we approached them. The Akamai rep was rather rude and dismissive about it; we were too small to be worthy of their attention. It's important to note that the growth of rural ISPs is limited by population. Even if we did not have rapacious cable and telephone monopolies to compete with, our size is naturally limited by the number of possible customers. Each of those customers is every bit as valuable as an urban customer, but Netflix won't even give us the SAME amount per customer it gives Comcast, much less more (it costs more to serve each one). And Netflix is particularly out of line because it is insisting that we pay huge bandwidth bills for an exclusive connection just to it. It is also wasting our existing bandwidth by refusing to allow caching. If Netflix continues on its current course, ALL ISPs -- not just rural ones, will eventually be forced to rebel. And it will not be pretty. Our best hope, unless Netflix changes its ways, is for a competitor to come along which has more ISP-friendly practices. Such a competitor could easily destroy Netflix via better relations with ISPs... and better performance and lower costs due to caching at the ISP. --Brett Glass