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That's why the cable companies like Comcast want to take over. "Free" streaming with your existing subscription. It's already out there in their Xfinity app.

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I haven't paid for cable in my life and I don't plan on starting. The on-demand functionality that streaming services offer and their multiple-device support is way too useful to give up in place of cable services.

Xfinity costs extra money and I don't get nearly enough in return for it to be useful to me. Not only that, but content streamed over their Xfinity is still counted against my bandwidth cap with them so basically I am paying them extra money to kick me a little bit harder.

On the other hand, if it didn't count against your bandwidth cap, then we'd all be calling it abuse of a monopoly power to muscle out Netflix (b/c Netflix does count towards the bandwidth cap).

If the content is being streamed from within their network then I don't think it should cost me part of my BW cap, it is almost free to deliver at that point.

I think the same is true for Akaimai and other CDN's that host servers with ISP's to provide local caches to content. This would certainly also mean that bandwidth caps become more generous because so much of the content that most people are using is on CDN's.

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