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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

Even a strong reason for cable companies such as Comcast to enforce their 250 Gb monthly transfer limit.

If "traditional" cable TV is to survive they are going to have to offer a-la carte channel choice. I'd pay $5-10/month per channel for the handful of channels that carry interesting content. I refuse to pay $100/month for the 90% of channels that are pure crap.

I'm not trying to defend the cable company (hate them anyway), but I just want to point out one potential problem with the thinking: it's very likely that the 10% of channels that you are interested is in the 90% of those that others think are pure crap. The original idea to charge a lump-sum subscription fee instead of a-la carte is precisely to combat this trap. Otherwise, many niche programs will not be available in the beginning.

That makes no sense. A television network's survival depends on the ability of non-competing tv networks to subsidize its existence?

Also, the major channels are probably available for free over the air in HD!

This was just an artifact of 'circuit-switched' CATV networks. With an IP-based network you can have 100,000 channels that cost nothing as long as they're not being watched. Literally anyone can start their own cable channel. (Starting to sound familiar yet?)

In such an environment, a la carte programming is the only thing that can possibly make sense. The tiered plans are gone for good, and cable companies will just have to deal with it and get over it.

Second that. I've already given up TV years ago for that reason. 90% is crap, and the other 10% I learned I can live without.

Your thinking is natural but ultimately mistaken because of the counter-intuitive aspects of zero-marginal-cost economics. Here's a great thought experiment which illustrates the problem:

http://makeanysense.blogspot.com/2010/07/more-choice-is-less...

A-la-carte channel choice isn't totally impossible, but it's not straightforward to make work and it's not obviously better.

The problem is that basically everyone has a channel or two that they like that's only carried because of bundling.

Actually, it is already illegal for cable companies to not provide a-la carte channels, the problem is they have a workaround which is that to get them, you have to order basic service, and then they charge ridiculous amounts for the individual channels.

Doesn't this become anti-competitive at a certain point?

You as the customer buy two (or more) services from Company A. They require you agree to stringent terms on one of those services in order to cut back your use of Company B's services.

Being anti-competitive is not illegal in most cases.

It's only illegal when you're a monopoly, I believe. In many areas (such as mine), there is only one cable provider (and we don't have FIOS either).

Honestly, if anyone is getting the short end here, it's comcast. Imagine if some loophole allowed FedEx to tie trailers onto UPS's delivery trucks. That's exactly what netflix is doing to comcast.

I think a closer analogy would involve USPS first charging you for building and paving the road to your house, and then wanting to charge you extra when you would like FedEx to drive on that road to deliver something to your house.

I'm okay with that analogy, if we understand that the USPS made an agreement "You may have 250 heavy-duty trucks arriving to your door per month", of course allowing for changes to be made in said contract. Once those 250 heavy-duty trucks actually got rolling, if it became deleterious to the USPS, I can see it being reasonable to change the terms of the contract according to the contract itself.

I'm purposefully arguing for the unpopular side here, btw. I'm definitely in the 99th percentile of bandwidth users and likely on verizon's own enemy's list. I can see it from the other perspective is all.

Once you get into the world networks with multiple OC192 connections all it takes is a little math to show Verizon still makes money from most heavy users. The marginal cost of your 5 to 25MB/s slice of bandwidth you use is just not that expensive especially if they are also selling you cable and or phone service.

PS: For a huge ISP peaking 10mb for 2.4 hours at the worse time of the day is much more costly than a constant 1mb connection 24/7. But, you are not going to see this inter the debate.

What? No it isn't at all. Comcast is just getting upset that people are using the service they are paying for. The same goes for AT&T and their removal of their "unlimited" data plan after the iPhone became popular and they realized that people actually enjoy using what they pay for. Your analogy would make more sense if you said imagine if FedEx paid UPS enormous amounts of money every month to ship a fixed number of packages and FedEx actually used the service they paid for to ship packages via UPS.

I wonder if cable companies have higher revenues because customers have upgraded internet connection speeds. I know basic internet plans (< 10 Mbps) are not good enough to stream HS content from Netflux and other devices.

Not sure this is true. I have 6Mbps down and that is good enough for h264-encoded 720p video. Dunno how Netflix encodes their video, but it's definitely possible to stream video with less than 10Mbps of bandwidth.

NetFlix only needs to buy one cable company to be able to eat away all the others.

They could buy one smaller one in secret now, or they can wait until they can swallow a big one in the future.

That had better apply to all services the same. If it applies to Netflix but not a competing service that the cable company has a part in, I call foul.

True. I think this might be a short term issue though. Software often pushes hardware to it's limits. Networks will catch up over the next 5 years.

Comcast really doesn't mind if you go over the 250Gb/month limit. http://i.imgur.com/VkuiD.jpg

I was disconnected for going over a few months in a row. They put me on a one-year blacklist for that. But it turns out that only the "residential" access has caps, and the lowest "business" tier was about the same speed for not much more money. By my reckoning, I'm now pushing almost 40 TB/mo (mostly bittorrent, all legal) and no complaints from Comcast.

Is this for work/science? What could you possibly download 40 TB of monthly? I am just curious.

Hm, on inspection I am off by about a factor of 10, but if I had a faster net connection, I could hit that without too much trouble. I've got the usual Ubuntu ISO's and some more experimental OS's like "Elementary OS". I use uTorrent, which has mini-apps available. Most of the apps are just channels for content, so I've got Make Magazine channel, which only has old videos by now; TED talks, which are always popular; Pioneer One, which is an indie made-for-the-web TV show I like; and Khan Academy videos which use a lot of bandwidth because they've packaged an entire unit per torrent. In addition I'm downloading the Geocities torrent [1], and I got a bunch of video presentations from the Chaos Communications Congress back in December which are still in demand [2]. Since I last rebooted, the most popular torrents I have are videos from The Next HOPE conference, and BackTrack 4.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840481 and http://www.archiveteam.org/archives/geocitiespatch/

[2] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events.en.html and ftp://media.ccc.de/congress/2010/mp4-h264-HQ/

I imagine if you were one of the MAJOR seeders for a legal torrent (Open Source software, CC content, etc.) you could easily hit that. If 1000 people download a 5GB Linux distro from you, that's 5 TB.

Or if you're working with something like video or CAD and constantly sending slightly changed multi-GB files around each time.

"Or if you're working with something like video or CAD and constantly sending slightly changed multi-GB files around each time"

If you were using version control, couldn't you push just the diffs?

Does it work the same for binaries as text?

There are definitely systems that will just send the bytes that have changed (and their locations naturally). DropBox does this:

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=17631

Yes, that's impressive. Our largest plan here has 30GB of transfers per month... (Canada)

They gave me a wrist-slap call when I used 2.x TB in a month. That was before I realized there was a 250GB limit on my unlimited plan...

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