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Comment by Scaevolus | Hacker News Reader

Paying 0.055 EUR per GB of traffic sent to French residents makes video streaming fundamentally unprofitable.

Not just video streaming. Think of game downloads, software updates, video calls, cloud storage, backups.

A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax. And not just for a sale, but for every download.

Got the latest Apple security update? Think about whether it is really worth paying a couple bucks to install it.

> A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax.

Maybe this would teach the publisher some "computer science". /s

Government getting a strongly-worded letter from Netflix is a hilarious concept.

Sure, but the problem is that this is outweighed by the downsides to the law.

>> Paying 0.055 EUR per GB of traffic sent to French residents makes video streaming fundamentally unprofitable.

How so? If you're paying a few EUR to watch a movie there's should be plenty of profit left.

What if you're paying a few EUR a month for unlimited streaming on some app, not high profit new movies? The profit they make per episode for some rerurn of some old show you binge is probably a few cents at best.

Video streaming platforms are not generally running on a pay-per-view monetization model. A few offer this, but the vast majority of them are offering it at $15-20/months for unlimited streaming. 4K video uses quite a bit of bandwidth. Low end is something like 15Mbps. That’s ~7GB/hour. Or, $0.385/hour at these proposed rates. Doesn’t take long to start approaching the cost of the streaming services charge.

And for households with kids, it's easy to imagine that turning into 30 hours a month, or $12 by your reasonable estimate. That's not a huge number, but I'm sure that'd push almost any streaming service into negative territory. I don't know what the average service's profit margins are, but highly doubt any of them could absorb that kind of hit.

The easy answer there is to limit French residents to 720p rather than 4K for the $15 plan.

720p AV1 is about 700mb/hr, so about an order of magnitude less than your 7GB/hour.

It's not like a 720p limit for tax reasons is any worse than a 720p limit for lack-of-Widevine-support reasons.

Meh, a strong reason to not retire to the south of france.

That's not how streaming services work

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