Netflix has been making aggressive moves fueled by new income from a rapidly growing subscriber base. The company currently offers 1 DVD at a time by mail with unlimited streaming in the US for $8.99 a month. Based on a plan already available in Canada and reports like this one, a stream only plan for $1 less is coming:
…….could be considering a cheaper, streaming-only plan for U.S. subscribers. Currently if you want access to the Netflix streaming service you have to have a more expensive subscription that includes getting media sent to you through the mail even if you don’t want it or won’t ever use it. Netflix has already started a similar plan in Canada with unlimited streaming for only $7.99. (Neowin)
With new content deals including one with NBC Universal that must have happened just before the new Comcast bosses could nix it, there’s certainly enough content to make the stream alone attractive. More content of $1 less could be bad very news for the cable guys who are losing cost conscious subscribers and Blockbuster who hopes to compete in the same arena.
While the cable industry led by Comcast has slithered into the ambulance chaser never land of redefining language to fit questionable business practice, the studies we keep seeing say they are still blocking their subscribers’ traffic. This kind of up is down and wrong is right mumbo jumbo-ing of language is something the Telco’s have done gleefully for years. Never mind the hearings, they are just lawyer to lawyer double talk with a few members of the public mixed in for color on Cspan.
We can expect the bad behavior to continue as long as the duopoly’s two strongest competitors are named Slim and None.
Krishna Gummadi of the Institute told the Associated Press that the tests did conclusively show that Cox and/or Comcast were “blocking” P2P, because it’s possible that international carriers could be disrupting traffic as it made its way from the MSOs to the servers in Germany used to conduct the tests.
“To ensure the best possible online experience for our customers, Cox actively manages network traffic through a variety of methods including traffic prioritization and protocol filtering,” Cox said in its response to the AP.
The study, which based its findings on data retrieved from 8,175 volunteers who used a downloadable test tool, said most (573 of 599) U.S. “hosts” that observed “blocking” are located in Comcast- and Cox-run networks. In Singapore, all blocked hosts were connected via the StarHub network, according to the study. (Light Reading)
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