Danny Crichton, TechCrunch:
[The repeal of net neutrality] will allow telecom companies like AT&T to prioritize their own content over that of competitors. In the past, AT&T didn’t have all that much content, but the addition of Time Warner now gives them a library encompassing Warner Bros. to TBS, TNT, HBO and CNN. Suddenly, that control over prioritization just got a lot more powerful and profitable.
And:
If Comcast bids and is successful in buying 21st Century Fox, then connectivity in the United States will be made up of a handful of gigantic content library ISPs, and a few software players that will have to pay a premium to deliver their content to their own subscribers. While companies like Netflix and Alphabet have negotiated with the ISPs for years, the combination of these two news stories puts them in a significantly weaker negotiating position going forward.
So if you get your internet from AT&T or DirectTV or Time Warner (or other AT&T owned/branded ISPs), keep an eye out for either Netflix packet slowdown or an offer to make your connection net neutral.
And what about YouTube? No reason AT&T wouldn’t slow YouTube packets to allow their own content to hog the fast lane. Will this threat rekindle the stuttering Google Fiber (now spun off into Alphabet) efforts?
In what world is this a win for consumers? Feh.
So does anyone else think the “streaming wars” could potentially create a shift back to traditional non-streaming entertainment sources?
If it gets so convoluted as to what is available from which outlet and which ISP, will people just say “Screw it, I’m going back to cable”?
I feel like I just might.
I can’t see that being cost-effective.
We’re doing what we can over here, too. But at some point, it’s the ISP charges that’ll become even more subject to monopolization privileges.
Yes, we need diversification, not these great absorptions that lead to monopolies. Eventually they’ll cost themselves out? Nah. I don’t know what the answer is.
At the root? Educating kids with an awareness of good citizenship and participation in a healthy republic would be something great to go back to. But Pearson doesn’t seem to test for that.
My son is one of the good ones. I did my part! That alone would help. Maybe the next gen. We can hope, right?
Consumers won’t win at all. We’ll pay more because carriers and media companies hate antitrust regulations. Thanks a lot, libertarians.
Me either “Screw it, I am going back to an antenna” yes. But that’s already part of my, and many peoples, solutions. It’s tricky, at first, if you want to save money, and still have access to decent content. But it can be done.
The American government and, by extension, a big chunk of the world economy are run by corporations. Consumers aren’t supposed to win in an economy run by corporations. Consumers are supposed to consume. It’s working exactly the way it’s supposed to unless people somehow wrest power from the corporations.
I’ve avoided streaming entertainment sources. Mostly because I live in a rural area where streaming is slow and unreliable. I still get my movies and TV shows on DVD from Netflix. I guess that can be jeopardized if the big ISP/content companies really want to crush Netflix. They can make it impossible for them to rent DVDs. If that happens I can easily live on a diet of books and CDs.