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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 17 2015, @07:25AM
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.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @10:04AM
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
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.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @06:26PM
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]