Will Comcast's set-box killer murder your data caps? The truth revealed Earlier this week, Comcast announced the Xfinity Partner Program, a service that will pipe TV directly into a subscriber's smart TV or streaming box without the need for a cable set-top box. The service would run through an app built on HTML5. This led some readers to question whether the TV content would be counted against …
We're with comcast so there's no such thing as broadband. I've heard rumors that they have fiber in other parts of the country but around where I live they can't be bothered to even provide speeds the FCC considers "broadband". We'll get fiber when hell freezes over if we're lucky.
Whilst I'm obviously against net neutrality, I can't quite believe I'm saying this but... I'm going to have to side with Comcast on this one. If they're streaming content that's originating/located within their own network and excluding this from data caps, I don't see a problem with this. Surely people would be kicking up a right stink if it did? (FYI, BT in the UK offer IPTV streaming via their YouView box-type things and this is taken from your allowance if you're not on a suitable unmetered package).
Monopoly.
It is not that Comcast do this. It's a good thing to do in certain situations. It is that it has a monopoly.
Think for a second that Comcast is not the internet or cable or TV or phone. Imagine it is a road provider or car manufacturer. Instead of only preferring their TV, now they decide who drives on the road, who pays fees and who gets to go home in the evenings. Instead of giving "free bandwidth" to their own services, they charge everyone to use the roads except their own services.
All of a sudden, all parcel delivery companies go out of business, shops have to sell themselves to Comcast because they cannot afford the transport costs.
With a monopoly a company can take control, and do whatever they like, which can be bad.
AFAIK Sky, BT etc have the cap be effected by their own services. However sometimes they offer other packages, and they know there is an option for customers to leave if they feel they are being treated unfairly.
When you have that much power, you (should) have the various parts of your business operating at arms length to each other. That means no free-passes by the internet/transmission business to the content side of the business, or vice-versa.
@P. Lee - I couldn't agree more, but (it's just me but ...) personally I would go way, way, WAY beyond that. I am wondering what disgusting tools thought it would be a fine idea for the content providers to be subsumed by the carriers. I also think that this would be more crystal-clear if the carriers were actually classified as what they de facto ARE: common carriers.
Comcast is not a monopoly, in the sense that these posts depict. A monopoly requires:
1. Comcast to be the only seller of the service.
2. Comcast to have no current or potential rivals.
3. Comcast's service to have no close substitutes.
While the first point may be true for specific cable markets, it's not generally true in the sense that others also sell television services in the same areas, albeit over other delivery means. Virtually anyone in the US can obtain television services through DirecTV or Dish Network. In many areas, Comcast also competes with local exchange carriers like Verizon and AT&T, who each have services built around TVoIP tied to their fiber-optic and xDSL networks. Both of these offer reasonably close substitutes, even though they don't offer them via a DOCSIS network.
1. In many areas in the US is the only seller.
2. This has been the case for decades and doesn't seem to be likely to change.
3. When I had Comcast broadband when I could access the internet there were days when 10kbps was good. I guess dial up is a substitute for the service I was receiving but not for what I was paying for.
When I moved a major factor in neighborhood choice was if there was access to more than one provider. Here I could get Verison or Comcast although I have no idea how good Comcast might be. I simply refuse to deal with the company, going as far as avoiding anything I know they own like NBC.
Returning to the topic at hand. As far as I know my Verison service does not have a set cap although they do throttle the connection unless you pay more. The set top box uses the same connection though. When the tv is off I get ~40/35Mbps. When the tv is on I get ~30/29Mbps. When we use on demand that drops to ~20/25Mbps. I pay for 50Mbps(up and down believe it or not) service. How exactly is Verison able to claim that their tv service is not limiting my internet legally when they do in fact?
A monopoly requires:1. Comcast to be the only seller of the service.
2. Comcast to have no current or potential rivals.
3. Comcast's service to have no close substitutes.
In general, that's not the case. To constitute a monopoly in most jurisdictions, a provider needs to have significant sway over the market - with the level of that control being defined slightly differently depending on where you are[1]. Having no competition is not the criterion; it is having no effective competition that triggers monopoly provisions.
Vic.
[1] For example, Out-law.com's page claims that " dominance has been found to exist where market share is as low as 40%."
In urban areas, they do. Outside those, there have non-compete arrangements. In my area, Fairpoint provides marginal DSL service to one side of the town, Comcast provides cable to the other half. The situation has been like that for the last 12 years and has survived 2 cable providers and 2 telcos.
(I consider myself lucky to be on the Comcast side. Fairpoint's fiber actually runs over our property but there are no local drops. Broadband service doubles back over copper from the end 9 miles away. It is barely able to deliver 768 kb/s but they have no qualm selling people 20 Mb/s packages.)
"When they say it is an IP-enabled service and it is traveling over their network, why is it not an internet service?" he told The Reg.
Oh that's easy, me sir! me sir! <raises hand>
An "internet" is a network of networks and if the data originates on and stays on their own internal network then it's not an "internet service".
"if the data originates on and stays on their own internal network"
Aheh, aheh, ah-HAHAHAHA HAAA!
Nothing online is truly secure, or truly isolated.
Now taking bets on how long after this goes live until someone hacks it for unlimited internet access.
(And when they do, a friend of mine already has the popcorn concession for the fireworks.)
I'd agree with the definition. But I'd add that, possibly, it's about time that as soon as they deliver something from off that network, they become a common carrier.
Want to own that line and charge anything you like with any rules you like? Keep it 100% your content. Wish to connect to the "internet" and sell it to your customers (down your line, cable or satellite etc), then you have to keep to the common carrier rules etc.
"Want to own that line and charge anything you like with any rules you like? Keep it 100% your content."
And there's the rub. Comcast OWNS NBC. That means there's vertical integration and they can serve up as much NBC and affiliated content as they want without ever going out on the Internet proper. (and as long as it's just going through the cables to the customer's cable modem, that's all first-party stuff, much like driving strictly on private roads means you don't necessarily need to register your car).
That originally read the headline as referring to "Comcast's sex-bot killer"? Would that be a good thing?
And I would also like to know how it is "like broadcast TV", when, AFAIK, the TV I receive via my aerial:
Is not compressed to within an inch of its life
is not logged with various data collectors as to what, when, which TV in my house, and (soon, if not now) who is watching.
It can, however, be recorded for time-shifting with a relatively inexpensive tuner card and a cast-off PC. It also includes the ads that the broadcaster put in, not the ones Comcast substituted.
Actually, ATSC IS compressed, and depending on the channel, pretty badly, too.
Remember, ATSC only uses MPEG-2, pretty old technology when we have H.265 now. Because of this and a 19Mbit/sec allotment limit, it's limited to 1080i60/30 or maybe 1080p24 if a film's on. Plus, only the local stations are in reach. Some are lucky to be able to pick up one or two. I can't get any due to range. Plus the channels can be multiplexed, further crimping the available bandwidth.
At least with the box I can connect it to my HD PVR and do pretty much the same thing as you, only with the complete cable lineup, including most of the on-demand stuff.
Remember, ATSC only uses MPEG-2, pretty old technology when we have H.265 now. Because of this and a 19Mbit/sec allotment limit, it's limited to 1080i60/30 or maybe 1080p24 if a film's on.
This is completely untrue. While many channels do provide signals near 19Mbps, those are hardly constant bit rates. Even then, you could achieve 2160p with MPEG-2 and below 19Mbps, not that it would look at brillant as at 50Mbps or higher, but you could do it if you had the encoder available. Nothing in the MPEG-2 standard prevents high resolution with low sampling rates. Sad to say, that's a matter of that dreaded free market that gets shouted down so often. No one to blame for that but you, me, and everyone else who consumes video.
No, it's quite true in a practical sense. That's why the limits were set when the ATSC standard was established. Trying to do 1080p60 on a 19Mbit/sec allowance (and this IS set in stone, as it's based on the physical limitations set by the frequency allotment defined by the FCC) would not produce an acceptable picture (and it needed to be acceptable to get people to jump off analog, especially the old who would resist change because it's change). Plus there's the matter that the tuner at the receiver end probably wouldn't understand it (that's why the resolutions were formalized, so the decoders would know what to expect).
I seem to recall that most telephony is now IP based because companies like BT realised that they were running telephony and data networks side by side and a common underlying protocol would give economies of scale.
So I find it hard to draw the line between cable TV and the Internet.
If you have a clear point to point connection from the home to the nearest content server for TV, say over a VPN, then this looks very much like a "soft" cable connection regardless of the physical carrier. These days trying to define something purely by the physical connection is getting hard as so much is software defined.
I can't see much (if any) difference between Comcast and any other content provider providing TV programmes over an IP connection apart from the fact that Comcast usually owns the wet string.
Which makes me wonder about the UK market. There seems no technical reason why Sky can't offer their service over Virgin Media cable or VM offer the same content as cable over BT ADSL.
Are we about to become more restrictive than the US cable industry?
I would certainly like to be able to use a 3rd party STB or an HTPC instead of my current Virgin Tivo.
like @mike16 above, I also first read the article title as
'Will Comcast's sex-bot killer murder your data cops?
So, it's either new glasses time, or I'll just put it down to tiredness combined with having just finishing 'The Silver Eggheads' by Fritz Leiber fecking with me..
Hmmmmm. My initial suspicion is that this is more about saving money for Comcast in not having to deal with physical set-top boxes. At the moment, the cable TV companies have to spend massive amounts of time and money managing not just the inventory of set-top boxes (which means warehouse staff and facilities all over the country too), but also paying people to come out and install them. Then there's the added issue of having to keep your hardware up-to-date - new high-def formats mean a lot of old set-top boxes are going to be obsolete, and every time that happens the cable TV companies have to pay for new set-top boxes and more people to go out and perform the physical upgrades onsite. But, if all you have is a software app, then you can just update that online. This sounds more like something that will save Comcast money being sold as "good for the customers".
The root issue here in the US is that bundled pay-TV subscriptions from Comcast, the other cableco's, AT&T, Verizon, Dish, and DirecTV all now face direct competition form lower cost streaming services like NetFlix, Amazon, Hulu, etc., which offer much of the same content as a pay-TV subscription. And many of these services, such as NetFlix, provide that content commercial-free.
This is the first part of an attempt by Comcast to slow or stop the practice of 'cable-trimming' by it's pay-TV service subscribers, who have been dropping their pay-TV subscriptions in favor of much lower cost streaming services while continuing with their subscription to Comcast's broadband ISP service. Cable trimming is something that Comcast and other pay-TV providers also offering ISP services absolutely hate, because the pay-TV portion of the monthly TV+ISP subscription bill often comprises as much as 60-70% of the total, putting a noticeable dent in their revenue.
Once the streaming service is in place, the second part of Comcast's plan will involve some sort of fairly strict enforcement of their existing data cap limits, which they've had in place for some time. The last time I used Comcast as an ISP was 4 years ago, and the usage caps were in place then. The usage was shown on your bill, but at the time the cap wasn't enforced, and was set fairly high, at 200 or 300 GB/month.
My questions now are:
1) What size caps will they be enforcing, and in what manner?
2) How much do they really think they can charge per month for their streaming service?
3) Will it be commercial-free,like NetFlix and others, or will we be forced to sit through endless strings of pointless commercials for any number of products we don't want or need to buy at the moment* , as we're forced to do with all of today's available pay-TV subscriptions?
*Some of these are injected by the pay-TV providers themselves, replacing ads in the source stream from the content provider's (e.g Discovery, ESPN, etc.) network feed.
The thing is, Comcast is in a unique position. They have the advantage of vertical integration due to being BOTH a transport AND a source (Comcast owns NBC). It's like a railroad owning a mine or a timber plot. Private property rights now butt up against competition regulation, and everyone has skin in the game one side or the other.
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