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dave562 writes: "There was an interesting article posted on Zero Hedge lately on the throttling of Netflix.
'For years, the Netflix streaming business has been growing like a parasite, happy to piggyback on established broadband infrastructures, where the broadband companies themselves have becomes competitors to Netflix for both distribution and content. Until now. Emboldened by the recent Net Neutrality ruling, which has put bandwidth hogs like Netflix which at last check was responsible for over 30% of all downstream US internet traffic, broadband providers are finally making their move, and in a preliminary salvo whose ultimate compromise will be NFLX paying lots of money, have started to throttle Netflix traffic. The WSJ reports (Paywall) that the war between the broadband-ers and the video streaming company has finally emerged from the "cold" phase and is fully hot.'"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by No Respect on Friday February 21 2014, @12:13AM
We're moving from NY to Florida next month. I was looking forward to trying Netflix once we got there, but Comcast is the only highspeed internet choice where we're going. No Netflix for me! (ATT U-Verse is available, but it's a lot slower than Comcast's offering since it's not an FTTP area)
There have been reports that Comcast - and others - have been throttling Netflix since before the recent net neutrality court decision, so whether or not we ultimately took the plunge to give Netflix a try was iffy to begin with. The threat of not getting consistent and reliable, either now or in the future, is costing Netflix real money, right now. At least in my personal quantum of sample size.
Looking at the lobbyists arrayed on the issue, I don't see any way net neutrality survives much longer. The current FCC chairman himself is a former lobbyist from what I hear. When his tenure is up he'll go right back through that revolving door into the arms of grateful telecoms who will reward him handsomely for his service.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Astax on Friday February 21 2014, @05:06AM
I have Netflix in NJ (Over the river) and while they may throttle, I sure as hell never noticed this. Comcast Internet is totally overpriced garbage, but I am able to view Netflix just fine. Your mileage may vary. Few years ago they also put some sort of datacaps into the unlimited service... once again I never hit said cap so it had 0 impact on me.
(Score: 2, Informative) by keick on Friday February 21 2014, @05:50PM
I thought I'd jump in and say.... Just try it.
I'm on a 8 year old 3Mbps DSL link and I use netflix every single night. Most of the time, after a couple minutes of watching, the stream flips to high-def. They have some amazing compression.
Two months ago I got boosted to a theoretical 7mbps, and yes now I can watch two netflix shows simultaneously... But usually all this means is that when my wife decided she needs her netflix fix, I don't get lagged out of xbox live :)