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posted by CoolHand on Friday April 17 2015, @02:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the as-soon-as-my-bandwidth-increases dept.

Netflix shares rose 13% in after-hours trading after the company announced it had added 5 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2015:

That brings the total global subscribers to the service to 62.3 million.

Netflix also said revenue increased by 23% from the same period a year earlier to $1.57bn (£1.06bn).
...
Shares in Netflix have risen by nearly 40% since the start of this year.

However, the company has faced increasing threats as companies such as Hulu and HBO have sought to commission their own, original on demand content to compete with Netflix [shows] like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.

The last couple of years have seen other companies like Hulu, HBO, and now CBS following suit. If ESPN or other sports players do the same the cable industry could end with a bang, not a whimper.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 17 2015, @05:27AM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday April 17 2015, @05:27AM (#171896) Journal

    Just remember there is a great deal of unhappiness while you scream at your screen watching some whirling buffering symbol every 50 seconds because the national championships you wanted to watch suddenly appealed to a much larger audience, namely EVERYONE across the country. You call and bitch, but your ISP says the origination network can't keep up.

    So even though you are paying 250 a month for the fastest download you can afford, there STILL exist no possible upload bandwidth at the origination sufficient to handle a separate stream for every interested party in the entire nation.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 17 2015, @07:25AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday April 17 2015, @07:25AM (#171927) Journal

    Just remember there is a great deal of unhappiness while you scream at your screen watching some whirling buffering symbol every 50 seconds because the national championships you wanted to watch suddenly appealed to a much larger audience

    Is there really, or do people accept it as "that's just the way it is" when it happens? I remember as a kid watching TV with the bunny ears and the signal would fritz out all the time owing to weather or something, and while it was annoying everyone accepted it as the cost of doing business. My kids accept the "buffering..." symbol without missing a beat because it's all they've ever known. Of course I have known many stages of media distribution and it doesn't bother me either because A) it's that, or suffer through 25 minutes of blaring commercials every hour and B) I don't live or die for shows the way I did when I was 5--I can wait or drop it in the middle and I don't care.

    Really, does simultaneity really matter when watching a game, unless you're betting on it in Vegas? If buffering means you finish watching the game 5 minutes later than another guy in Seattle, does it really matter all that much? Seems to me it could actually heighten the drama if you look at it right.

    --
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    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @10:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @10:04AM (#171961)

      My kids accept the "buffering..." symbol without missing a beat because it's all they've ever known.

      You're kids are compliant, obedient, little consumers.
      You've done well, citizen, and earned your right to relocate to a better city. You are scheduled to relocate this coming Saturday. Make sure all your belongings are packed and ready to go. You will be relocated that day.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 17 2015, @07:07PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday April 17 2015, @07:07PM (#172150) Journal

      Really, does simultaneity really matter when watching a game,

      Well said, but totally misses the point.

      Its precisely that simultaneity is not important, and simultaneity is not used in TV streamed over the internet which exacerbates the problem that cord cutting on a massive scale will engender.

      Because you don't mind being a few minutes behind, as long as you get to watch all of the action, you will require a separate stream.

      Because of this, every event, show, movie, etc, will be buffered to disk, and all those streams will be served from beginning to end individually for each viewer. It doesn't matter if it is a live event or a canned program. But on live events, with a large audience, there may be no possible upload capacity that could handle the load.

      Do the math. Bandwidth per minute per device. Your cable connection may handle the load if you pay enough. But the source can't possibly support that many streams. Every Apple announcement/event breaks the internet. It wasn't designed around infinite upload capability.

      That you are prepared to put up with the frustration is hardly germane. We all know the ball game is physically over before our TV displays the final second. Simultaneity is not the issue.
       

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @06:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @06:26PM (#172512)

        I think a big factor is control and copyright law.

        There can be very many streams if you had many sources - e.g. the viewers and their ISPs and CDNs[1] could also stream copies to others. P2P torrenting scales well especially if ISPs can also legally participate.

        [1] if you had the $$$$$$$ and were willing to pay for it you could buy enough capacity to stream millions of streams: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ [amazon.com]
        http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/?rnd=1 [microsoft.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @01:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @01:37PM (#172011)

    Then maybe, perhaps, they should have taken the subsidies they've been receiving to upgrade said capacity and actually use it to upgrade said capacity, instead of using it as profit. They were paid, they did not deliver, if this were a restaurant we'd get our money back.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday April 17 2015, @07:13PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday April 17 2015, @07:13PM (#172154) Journal

      Then maybe, perhaps, they should have taken the subsidies they've been receiving to upgrade said capacity and actually use it to upgrade said capacity, instead of using it as profit. They were paid, they did not deliver, if this were a restaurant we'd get our money back.

      You just don't get it do you?
      No amount of upgrade can allow everyone who wants to watch the superbowl do so at the same time when each viewer needs a separate feed. The best system for that is ... ... wait for it... TV.

      You are trying to solve a physical problem with political pronouncements and pontification.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @11:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @11:04PM (#172220)

        No amount of upgrade can allow everyone who wants to watch the superbowl do so at the same time when each viewer needs a separate feed. The best system for that is ... ... wait for it... TV.

        You mean like broadcasting the radio waves out into the air such that anyone who who wants to watch it that is within the broadcast range just needs a receiver? The cable system is still just sending data, tv, voice, or other, and there's only congestion when its way oversold. All they have to do is not oversell the damn thing and upgrade as needed to handle new customers.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 17 2015, @11:38PM

          by frojack (1554) on Friday April 17 2015, @11:38PM (#172224) Journal

          You mean like broadcasting the radio waves out into the air such that anyone who who wants to watch it that is within the broadcast range just needs a receiver? The cable system is still just sending data, tv, voice, or other, and there's only congestion when its way oversold. All they have to do is not oversell the damn thing and upgrade as needed to handle new customers.

          One tv feed over the air or over the cable serves ALL viewers. One feed.
          Over sold isn't the issue here. Stop harping on that.

          100 million feeds from the source at the same time to accommodate every device with a separate super-bowl stream isn't possible. Even if you built a stadium right on top of the intersection of all internet backbone cables, you still couldn't do it.

          One TV feed can be sent everywhere, to 5 billion tv sets with no congestion issues. You cant send 5 billion separate tcp/ip streams. Please go study the difference between a single common stream to multiple point vs multiple unique streams to multiple points. Go read up on multi-cast, and why even IT wouldn't work.

          But please stop harping on oversold bandwidth. The problem isn't at your house. Its a the origination.

          --
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          • (Score: 1) by kryptonianjorel on Saturday April 18 2015, @04:22AM

            by kryptonianjorel (4640) on Saturday April 18 2015, @04:22AM (#172297)

            Never heard of multicast? Live events would be very easy to handle.

            • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday April 18 2015, @05:01AM

              by frojack (1554) on Saturday April 18 2015, @05:01AM (#172305) Journal

              I mentioned multicast. Read the thread.

              Have you noticed any use of multicast? Why not?

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  • (Score: 1) by TestablePredictions on Friday April 17 2015, @09:49PM

    by TestablePredictions (3249) on Friday April 17 2015, @09:49PM (#172202)

    The upload bandwidth problem was solved ~15 years ago with P2P data transfer technology. The copyright neurotics won't allow it though, because somebody might *gasp* try to save the video stream longer term. Broadcast (like OTA television) would be fine too. But nobody make DVR'ing the stream harder than it needs to be mmmkay?

    Things suck because moneyed interests interfere, not because of true technological limitations.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @10:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @10:59PM (#172217)

    Just remember there is a great deal of unhappiness while you scream at your screen watching some whirling buffering symbol every 50 seconds because the national championships you wanted to watch suddenly appealed to a much larger audience, namely EVERYONE across the country. You call and bitch, but your ISP says the origination network can't keep up.

    That's because the ISPs way oversell [stopthecap.com] the bandwidth capability, because "not everyone will be on at the same time" or whatever bullshit excuse they use. They also use the bullshit line of "up to x mbit" knowing that you will never see that theoretical top speed.