What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

Sun Apr 27 20:30:05 UTC 2014

>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