Could this court decision affect the adoption of 4k?

People who stream 4K have deeper pockets than people who stream 1080p or less and companies want people with deeper pockets as customers so no this will not curtail 4K streaming. Here in the NYC metro area (NYC, NJ, Conn) there are many TV ads for luxury items but if you go to an area with much lower household income you will not see as many ads for luxury items.
 
I think it could definitely have an impact on consumer choice as companies that are both ISPs and content creators (like Time Warner and Comcast) try and put the squeeze on other services like Netflix and Amazon. Comcast, for example, is working on its own streaming app and last summer it showed off 4k streaming at a cable industry event. What did they stream? Scenes of the TV show "Defiance" which airs on SyFy which is owned by NBC/Universal which was bought by Comcast a few years ago.
 
I think you're right. I think this will effect the future of streaming. If the Providers ("20 quatloos for the newcomer!") can put a meter on bandwidth for streaming services, then they will do their best to make it painful for Netflix and the rest to stream higher res content. The key is bandwidth and how well the streaming companies can do with compression.

This is just the first salvo in the Net Neutrality Wars
 
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If this ruling stands we'll have the information super highway with a pothole covered dirt road next to it. You can pay to play 4k from the big guys, or just be shut out if there isn't a profit incentive for the ISP.
I'm really hoping that this gets overturned. quickly.
 
There is just too much money flying around for the internet to just be free anymore. I can see the IPS's position as they are paying for the infrastructure and others are making money over that infrastructure with a free ride. Television broadcasting is not free for the companies involved, at some point the internet companies have to come of age and see if they can survive with real world expenses like the television medium they are trying to take business away from.
 
joe1946 said:
People who stream 4K have deeper pockets than people who stream 1080p or less and companies want people with deeper pockets as customers so no this will not curtail 4K streaming. Here in the NYC metro area (NYC, NJ, Conn) there are many TV ads for luxury items but if you go to an area with much lower household income you will not see as many ads for luxury items.
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I would argue it still hurts those pushing 4k, because it makes it more expensive.
For example, if they now get the top 5% of income earners to pay the increased costs
for 4k streaming, but before this case and the increased costs, they would have had
the top 7%, I don't see how it helps. I should clarify, of course it helps the ISPs. But it
hurts Netflix and the like (content providers) and it hurts the end users. Less people
able to pay for 4k content does NOT help its adoption in my view.
 
Bassman2003 said:
There is just too much money flying around for the internet to just be free anymore. I can see the IPS's position as they are paying for the infrastructure and others are making money over that infrastructure with a free ride. Television broadcasting is not free for the companies involved, at some point the internet companies have to come of age and see if they can survive with real world expenses like the television medium they are trying to take business away from.
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No one is getting a free ride. The ISPs get paid by end users like us and content delivers like Netflix, Google, Hulu, Amazon, etc.,. And as much as companies like Comcast complain the mark up on Internet access is insanely high. A while back I read a good article about how convoluted the ISP business is and I'll post the link if I can find it. Imagine if FedEx charged a fee to ship a package as well as a fee to receive the same package and if they didn't like the shipper or the receiver then the package would just get delayed. That's the kind crap that goes on with ISPs.

As far as 'real world expenses' go all of these sites pay a lot of money to license content to stream (which is a big reason many of them are starting to make their own original content). For example, the licensing fees Netflix paid jumped from about $180 million in 2010 to about 1.2 billion in 2012. And that's for less content too as Netflix couldn't afford to pay to renew contracts on everything which is why their streaming library shrank.

I do agree that content on the Internet isn't free (someone somewhere pays for it) but it's consumers that need to make that mental adjustment. The 'old media' players can't afford to subsidize 'new media' forever and new media still hasn't found it's footing when it comes to monetization. I worked a number of years for a pretty big video website and the going rate for web advertising was just pennies on the dollar even when compared to a horrible time slot on a B-list cable channel. Growing up I remember my parents having subscriptions to a lot of different magazines (which all contained ads of course) and I think we are headed back towards a time like that but for video content instead of mags. Everything from major sports leagues (MLB and NHL are already there) to popular streaming companies (Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, etc.,) to cable channels (HBO, ESPN, etc.,) will all be available for a monthly fee or pay-per-view VOD.

Getting back on point, the problem with the ruling is it allows ISPs to degrade service of select traffic for no reason at all. Previous to this ruling ISPs could only throttle specific traffic if it was bringing the whole network down (which is reasonable). But now, for example, Comcast, which has it's own movie service, can selectively degrade Netflix's bandwidth so that users will hopefully get fed up with the 'bad connection' and watch movies using Comcast's movie service. ISP's just provide 'dumb pipes' that allow clients and servers to connect to each other and the only reason ISP's are regulated along the same lines as telephone companies (whom also provide dumb pipes) is successful political lobbying.
 
Bassman2003 said:
There is just too much money flying around for the internet to just be free anymore. I can see the IPS's position as they are paying for the infrastructure and others are making money over that infrastructure with a free ride. Television broadcasting is not free for the companies involved, at some point the internet companies have to come of age and see if they can survive with real world expenses like the television medium they are trying to take business away from.
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1. The end users have paid for all that infrastructure through their monthly payments. A lot of it was also built with your tax dollars, so no…the ISPs can't claim that.
2. The TV spectrum actually belongs to the people and the government lets the TV networks use it.
3. This is not about competing, but about the ISPs having the power to decide what kind of content they want you to see and how to make more money in the process.
4. You really need to read up on Net Neutrality and the impacts losing it will have.
 
John Godden said:
BW costs so those using the most should pay for it!
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They do; they pay by the gig. That's one reason it's so difficult for YouTube to be profitable. It's not about the ISPs needing to get paid because they already get paid. It's about the ISPs wanting unchecked power over the Internet.
 
There are arguments on both sides. The ISP's are paid by us and by content providers for service at defined bandwiths now. The bigger the pipe you need the more you pay.
The current regs prevent ISP's from managing their networks most efficiently so that people get the bandwidth they need for their current activity with least compromise. The service bandwidth is already paid for.

The AVB standard that has just been ratified lets network systems manage service tiers automatically for best quality of service, whether you are making a voice call or streaming 4k, or video conferencing. The current network neutrality rules require your streaming movie and the cell phone call to be treated equally rather than actively managed for best quality of service for both with dedicated tiers assigned based on the bandwidth requirement of the data being transferred.
The danger with changing the rule or eliminating it altogether is that the ISP's would have a free hand to censor content rather than allowing all content equal access. But this is a different issue. Seems like we are more and more becoming a world where wealthy multi-national corporations have all the rights and people have none.

Absent some sort of open common carrier requirements, the corporations could restrict the currently free flow of information as they see fit for their own interests as if these networks were their own private property instead of a public service.
 
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Yes, I agree and inderstand the issues but you have to admit, since the internet began a lot of companies have been making a lot of money for little to no infrastructre cost. Amazon, Google and Netflix are a perfect example. Amazon's entire business is delivered free to them out to the public. This is over the ATTs, Cable Companies etc... network. Sure customers that use the service pay a monthly fee but the ISPs' are the business' that own the lines. There has to be something for having a company, taking risk and owning your assets just like taking to time to make a movie and wanting to own and decide how the film is put in the marketplace.

Just to be clear, this debate is not about current bandwidth. Your DSL or cable level of data for today is not an issue. Streaming 4k movies to a lot of people is a whole magnitude higher of data being used.

Yes, we never want censorship especially for competitive reasons and maybe this can be addressed, but people tend to have this false sense of entitlement when it comes to the internet. It just exists, and people are not owed it, but for it to grow to the level that 4k movies are going to be flying around some major money has to go down. Maybe companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix need to start their own direct connections to have their own standards, usage rates and content. Sounds kind of like another business...I can't put my finger on it...oh, like broadcast television networks. Full circle in a way.
 
One interesting thing is how the Internet is delivered. Some places it is over fiber or cable networks.
Other places it is over telephone lines (DSL). Some of these things are regulated by the government.
For example, a local company that installed the phone lines in my community and now provides DSL
internet over them, has been 'protected from competition' by our government in the past. So yes, they
own the lines, but it's not quite that simple either. I can't say I have an easy solution myself. Google
fiber in every town would be pretty cool :-). It seems like the US is behind other counties though as far
as relatively cheap/fast Internet access.
 
Google, Amazon, Et Al pay for their network service bandwidth to meet demand requirements just as we end users do. How the data is treated between them and us is the issue. The common carriers make good money at both ends already.
With H.265 or V9 codecs, there is no more bandwidth required for 4k than for 1080p in H.264.
 
Bassman2003 said:
Yes, I agree and inderstand the issues but you have to admit, since the internet began a lot of companies have been making a lot of money for little to no infrastructre cost. Amazon, Google and Netflix are a perfect example. Amazon's entire business is delivered free to them out to the public. This is over the ATTs, Cable Companies etc... network. Sure customers that use the service pay a monthly fee but the ISPs' are the business' that own the lines. There has to be something for having a company, taking risk and owning your assets just like taking to time to make a movie and wanting to own and decide how the film is put in the marketplace.

Just to be clear, this debate is not about current bandwidth. Your DSL or cable level of data for today is not an issue. Streaming 4k movies to a lot of people is a whole magnitude higher of data being used.

Yes, we never want censorship especially for competitive reasons and maybe this can be addressed, but people tend to have this false sense of entitlement when it comes to the internet. It just exists, and people are not owed it, but for it to grow to the level that 4k movies are going to be flying around some major money has to go down. Maybe companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix need to start their own direct connections to have their own standards, usage rates and content. Sounds kind of like another business...I can't put my finger on it...oh, like broadcast television networks. Full circle in a way.
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Nothing gets delivered free to the public. Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, etc., pay ISPs per gig to send data across the Internet (and then we pay to receive it). The more data those companies send across the Internet the more money they pay the ISPs. Nothing is free and these companies are building out additional infrastructure (sometimes even offering it for *free* to ISPs only to be rejected). For example, Amazon has huge data centers used for a variety of commercial applications (Netflix actually uses some of Amazon's servers to host content) and Apple builds huge data centers to host it's iTunes content. Both Netflix and Google have offered to give ISPs additional servers (filled with popular Netflix and Google content respectively) at no charge but not all ISPs accepted them. These servers would relieve network congestion for the ISP, provide better quality & faster connections to customers and would cost the ISP nothing to acquire nor maintain yet still some ISPs said no. Why? Because if they accepted these *free* servers that would improve the quality of service for *paying customers* like you and I the ISPs wouldn't be able to charge Netflix and Google as much money.

The ISPs just provide dumb pipes to move data from point A to point B. Sure there are costs, but the bigger costs come from the companies making and hosting the content. It's not fundamentally different from telephone lines. Yes, there are costs associated with building and maintaing a telephone network but those costs are dwarfed by the costs of the homes and businesses that use the telephone network. Although ISPs refuse to release official numbers (I wonder why), it's generous to say that the cost of bandwidth (see links below) is about $0.10 per GB (some estimates have it as low as one or two cents per gig). I think $50-$60/mo would be a typical price for Internet service in the US and that should buy a whole lot of gigs (even at the generous price of $0.10/GB). That's 10gigs per $1 or 500-600gigs per month. That's a lot of downloading (especially since most ISP cap around 200gigs or so). Gee, it looks like we are getting charged for amounts of data that are impossible to reach.

Speaking of network congestion and data caps... Both Time Warner and Comcast offer apps to their cable subscribers that allow the subscribers to stream cable channels to various devices (and in some cases use an Xbox360 in lieu of a cable box) and none of this streaming counts against the monthly data cap. Yup, you (hell, even multiple people concurrently) can watch movies and TV shows 24 hours a day for the whole month and none of the bandwidth counts against your data cap but the second you turn on Netflix *boom* the meter is rolling. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that ISPs greatly exaggerate the stress and congestion that's on their data networks.

With regards to TV channels, does ESPN have a direct connection to your home? MTV? Discovery Channel? No, they have deals with cable providers. And funny enough ESPN charges cable providers a fee to carry ESPN and then cable providers charge viewers a fee to watch ESPN content yet when it comes to the Internet, ESPN pays to send its content to viewers and viewers pay to receive content from ESPN. If you subscribed to Comcast cable and Comcast intentionally degraded all content that didn't come from one of their movie studios or TV networks would you find that acceptable (even HBO, which you pay extra for each month, comes in all glitchy)?


Time Warner Cable's Xbox streaming app won't count toward data caps

Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video

Former FCC chair: ISP data caps are about monetization, not network congestion

How much does bandwidth actually cost?


-Andrew
 
I've watched this net neutrality thing evolve over the years, always deeply puzzled. I would think that it's the content providers that have basically all the power.
If I was Google, I would say, right now: First ISP who tries to get any extra money from us gets all its users cut from all Google services. Maybe they will stay with you and use other search engine, other maps service, other email service... Or maybe they will go somewhere else and you will go down. You've gotta ask yourself a question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?
(and while you think about it, I will be rolling out this Google Fiber thing, just so you know you're going to lose no matter what you do)
 
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