Comcast + downloading caps = instant watching decline?

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Permalink Reply by Spindaddydad on August 29, 2008 at 2:08pm

I posted about this earlier and do think this is a major announcement. I'm afraid all service providers will soon follow suit and switch to capped plans or maybe even tiered plans as they do in Europe. The days of all-you-can-eat internet are sadly coming to an end.

I personally would purchase whatever plan that allows maximum download capacity. I can see people cutting back on or seriously watching closely their download totals when this takes effect. How big is a movie download?... 4 gb, 5gb? Comacast's 250 Gb is a lot, but TW's 40 can get eaten up in a hurry.

It will really be bad if they don't offer an unlimited top tier or if their maximum capped tier adds a per megabyte charge for overage. That's where you can really get hurt.

Sad days... sad days.

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Permalink Reply by Jobey on August 29, 2008 at 2:19pm

I personally am using Comcast. While I never hit the magic number of 250gb a month, I can't guarantee that I'll NEVER hit it in the future.....especially if Blu-Ray streaming is available. I'm seriously considering switching to DSL even though the speed that is available to me is half what Comcast offers, just because there's been no inkling of download caps with DSL (at least in my area).

I seriously think companies like Netflix need to get in the mix and bring some lawyers to bear since download caps WILL eventually affect their income statements. Its much easier to set a precedent now, than in 3-5 years when all the ISPs are capped. I really like Netflix, and would hate to see this new form of media (streaming movies) die out before it really gets going.

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Permalink Reply by Lester on August 29, 2008 at 2:20pm

I remembering reading a post by one of the Roku team on its forum, that it would be about 2 gb for a movie. I can't seem to find that post now, but FWIW, I found this from a user, which is consistent with what I remember: "Current highest quality video stream is 2.2 Mbps, which multiplies out to 990 MB/hour. "

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Permalink Reply by Spindaddydad on August 29, 2008 at 3:46pm

"Current highest quality video stream is 2.2 Mbps, which multiplies out to 990 MB/hour. "

not sure about all of this as it's out of my strike zone, but I believe the 2.2 Mbps is mega-bits, not mega-bytes so there's a difference. I think 8 bits = 1 byte. Not sure though.

I think a standard definition movie will eat about 4-6 Megabytes.

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Permalink Reply by Lester on August 29, 2008 at 4:09pm

I understand what you're saying, and poster may have confused the terms; I don't know. Maybe someone more tech-knowledgeable can help.

It be good if he were right, of course. If it's only 1 gb per hour, the 250 gb limit wouldn't affect most of us.

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Permalink Reply by Lester on August 29, 2008 at 4:27pm

I found this from Comcast, which is also consistent with the 1 gb per hour:

"250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo) "

That doesn't mean it's accurate, of course.

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Permalink Reply by Jobey on August 29, 2008 at 7:23pm

What's "off" about those numbers is that while 125 movies sounds like a lot, when you calculate in every other activity a person does during a 30 day period, it starts adding up. For example, surfing the net, watching online news, watching movies via netflix, playing online games (both MMORGs and buying/downloading games via digital distributions suchs as Steam, Direct2Drive, etc), email, buying music via itunes (or shows via itunes), watching tv programming via network sites (ie: cbs.com, etc)....all that adds up.

What is Comcast going to do when they bump up their speeds to 15mbps (rumor that will happen in the next 2-3 years to compete with FIOS)? All of a sudden everyone gets a 100-125% speed increase which will allow MORE downloading of digital content (ie: high def media). I think this is a very bad move for the consumers, but a very good move for ISPs....especially if they start charging people for "overages". We're living in an increasing digital world that should not be stunted by ISP caps.

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Permalink Reply by Striker090871 on August 29, 2008 at 4:42pm

I would say that Lester's numbers are about right. When I download movies, from someplace, like Unbox, or CinemaNow, the movie file, is usually around 1.5gb, to 2gb, and they have slightly better quality, than NetFlix IW.

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Permalink Reply by Spindaddydad on August 29, 2008 at 8:52pm

I think a standard definition movie will eat about 4-6 Megabytes.
Aack! I meant gigabytes, not megabytes

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Permalink Reply by Striker090871 on August 29, 2008 at 2:31pm

I agree, I hope that they at least offer, an uncapped plan. At the very least, they should give you a place to check your current monthly usage, or an alert email, if you are getting close.

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Permalink Reply by Fox Mulder on August 29, 2008 at 2:34pm

This article is from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/technology/15cable.html?_

This is actually from a thread from Page 8 of this forum. It says a DVD quality Netflix movie can eat up to 5 GB.

As for me, this is one of the reasons I decided not to buy a Roku player. If all the major ISP's will have caps it kind of limits how much you can use the Roku player per month.

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Permalink Reply by 2McAbre on August 29, 2008 at 2:18pm

This is why I suggested a while back that a good investment area for Netflix to look at would be co-partnering with the big cable/ satellite companies.

Simply license the software used by the Roku Player to be included with the software on the local cable boxes. A new dedicated channel would be for Netflix streaming video and could replace or supplement these companies existing MOD offerings.

This would offer two things.

1.) No need for another box, the cable/satellite boxes already have the necessary hardware support, in fact many services offer DVR which would expand the service by allowing a greater buffer zone on the HD and/or storage for later viewings of already downloaded titles (say you wanted to watch an entire series from Netflix, it could be downloaded in the background).

2.) Instead of buying a ROKU (or similar player) you would pay to the various providers a modest fee (say $4.95 to $5.95 per month) x$ would goto Netflix for licensing the service, the rest would go to the provider (Comcast, Time Warner, DirectV etc.) to cover the bandwidth, which of course would not be capped, and the infrastructure enhancements.

Then all you'd have to do is access channel 2000 (or the Netflix Channel) and it would be your queue, select your program, and view it.

Irregardless of how the situation is handled, there will be a cost to someone somewhere, and I'm sure that Netflix has people "think tanking" this very issue. They would be foolish to presume that Internet providers will foot the bills of users subscribing to another companies streaming service.

Another possibility would be for Netflix to contract with one (or more) of the big providers and offer Internet access packages to be inclusive or additional to their existing packages.

It just makes sense that if the streaming video market is set to explode at some point in the future (as I believe it will) that the service will not remain a "free" service. At some point the cost of delivery (bandwidth, infrastructure etc) will require an additional cost to maintain, and still be profitable.

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