>most customers with an unmetered connection would take it because it's effectively free money
not really, because have to pay for the electricity costs of leaving your computer on 24/7. assuming a modest 50W power consumption for a PC, that works out to 36KWh per month, or $3.6 at 10 cents /Kwh. That alone wipes away your $1/month you're saving. also, that's a third of the monthly plan cost, how much of a discount can netflix really offer here?
as for hard disk space, I'll grant it's "free" space (as in the consumer wasn't going to use it anyways), but running consumer drives 24/7 with frequent seeks can't be good for them.
There is no need to have the consumer PC running 24/7. Also there is no need to have the same uplink speed as downlink speed. Consumers on average just need to reach a seed ratio of 1, while downloading and consuming the content and then possibly doing other stuff on their devices until the content is deleted. Actually, if they only reach 0.3 on average, then still 30% of the server infrastructure is saved, which is already a lot.
not really, because have to pay for the electricity costs of leaving your computer on 24/7. assuming a modest 50W power consumption for a PC, that works out to 36KWh per month, or $3.6 at 10 cents /Kwh. That alone wipes away your $1/month you're saving. also, that's a third of the monthly plan cost, how much of a discount can netflix really offer here?
as for hard disk space, I'll grant it's "free" space (as in the consumer wasn't going to use it anyways), but running consumer drives 24/7 with frequent seeks can't be good for them.