YouTube puts T-Mobile US on naughty list for throttling all vids to 480p YouTube has waded into the row over T-Mobile US's Binge On service. Binge On launched in November, and lets people watch unlimited amounts of video from Netflix, Hulu and other selected providers: the streams do not count against subscribers' monthly download caps. There is a catch, though. These toll-free videos are streamed …
"and many of the latest smartphones can handle 1080p resolution"...
Many many mobiles (mid range and even budget) have been able to handle 1080p for ages. Nexus 5, a cheap £300 handset from the end of 2013 had a 1080p screen, and it certainly wasn't the first, the LG G2 launched earlier in 2013 had 1080p too.
We've moved on since then... Nexus 6 from 2014 had a QHD screen (2560x1440), as did the LG G4. this years 6P and many many many other handsets from Samsung, HTC, etc etc...
Even a windows phone, April 2014 - Lumia 930
Apple were slow adopters, but even they managed to finally get 1080 on the 6 plus model in September 2014.
IIRC Sony have even launched a 4K mobile.
I wonder if there is any actual perceptible difference in all these super high resolutions on a 6" screen? The consumer ought to have the choice, and the provider should not be forcible limiting them, but I wonder how many people can tell the difference between 480p, 720p and 1080p on a tiny little screen.
From what I've read in comments here, tethering is something many phone contract disallow, along with paltry data allowances. Are there a lot of people watching streaming video from their phones and 'casting it to the TV maybe?
On my Nexus 5, I can see a difference between 480p and 720p if there is text on the screen (e.g. The text of the banner at the bottom of the screen, on a news channel). I don't see any point in going higher than 720p on a small screen.
I'm aware of at least one operator who killed their network, selling unlimited bundles of FaceBook and WhatsApp. Since this operator hadn't also bought a deep packet inspection solution, and had no control over how their end users used these services, their end users were enjoying unlimited video calls (or at least trying to; all of them at the same time).
"I wonder if there is any actual perceptible difference in all these super high resolutions on a 6" screen? The consumer ought to have the choice, and the provider should not be forcible limiting them, but I wonder how many people can tell the difference between 480p, 720p and 1080p on a tiny little screen."
You can certainly see the difference on my Nexus 6, 1080p does have an extra air of "oooh" to it... But it looks even better at 1080p on the Nexus 7 (allowing for the contrast drop from OLED to IPS), purely because of the extra inch!
Size certainly does matter.
Having said all that, I happily watch reruns of 4:3 TV programs on my big TV which were recorded in analogue originally and barely qualify for 480p... Although I can't say you don't notice, but after the first few seconds you settle into the program and don't care... Content quality over broadcast quality!
Unless it's an NTSC recording from the USA where the colours are just screwed up! That I notice all the way through, and have to turn the colour level down on the TV to stop my eyes bleeding!
So you reckon that playing any video in anything other than its native resolution is copyright infringement?
You are a complete spanner and ICMFP!
(Hint for the terminally thick: I reckon youtube don't put those 8k vids up purely for decoration).
I juat discovered that after rejecting the requests to join Binge-On, it was turned on for me. If I was like John Legere I'd probably Tweet something like, "People hate your shitty #carrier feature so much that you have to turn it on secretly. #suckmycarrier #blurryslownetwork"
YouTube are like the great granddaddy of torrent leechers. They chew on everyone else's bandwidth for their own benefit and give fuck-all back (any contribution made to backbone routing by google is of sod-all significance when it's your local loop getting the shaft).
For some reason, when we elect to block or throttle some leeching git it's a good thing, but when a provider does it for the same reasons, it's bad. One law for us I guess.....
Easy answer. If you really must have 24hr mobile access to that cat falling in the bog, don't use T-Mobile. Personally I like competition and a service where I knew that the bandwidth wasn't being shat on by drooling morons giggling at shit videos sounds very attractive.
I don't pretend to have a good understanding of how the large scale infrastructure of the Internet works but you clearly don't have the faintest clue. Unless you are actively using YouTube it doesn't affect your personal connection to the intertubes in the slightest (with some caveats). The local loop is the last bit of cable that runs to your house and it's used by you alone.
What you are probably referring to is congestion on the backbone and backhaul links. This is a problem but it's not YouTube's problem any more than it's Facebook's or Netflix's or in fact any other company or individual that sends data across the net - that's the fundamental point of net neutrality. Any company sending out data on to the network is paying for that service if the network can't cope with the amount of data the providers can either charge more or install more capacity.
Caveats: I'm assuming your using ADSL or a flavour of it. It's different on a cable network.
"The local loop is the last bit of cable that runs to your house and it's used by you alone."
No, its used by him and whoever is else is connected to the home router. Also FWIW my "local loop" is about 10m long whereupon it disappears into a cabinet shared by the entire street so if all the people in my street are watching HD cat videos then my service will be impacted considerably.
> Are severely throttling many services on their feel like home offering.... Nobody seems too bothered about that though.
... nobody except the potential customers who go elsewhere.
Last week I looked into switching to 3 for Feel At Home while travelling in Europe. Then I read how the service was often throttled to the point of uselessness. So I went out and bought a dual SIM phone instead.
You say that it isn't copyright infringement to watch in anything other than the resolution given - (I'll choose to use that phrasing rather than native resolution because - it's youtube and they'll rescale it) - but are you sure that the way they've written the "format shift" parts of the copyright law have been written with this in mind?
I mean, any playback device can and will reformat it - by necessity - but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody in parliament went "Whoop! We've actually made this normal use case entirely illegal - never mind" (Bare in mind that the UK government has made it so they can ask for the keys for your SSL traffic and then arrest you for not being able to provide them - and want to have "connection records" but to fully comply with that you'd need to track every data packet between every router - after all, the description is so woolly and every packet is effectively a connection...)
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