If we're going with metering, I hope cable television watchers can join in the fun. If I subscribe for cable television and I only watch two hours a month, why should I subsidize someone who uses it 12 hours a day?
The argument based on costs is that it costs a cableco, or e.g. satellite company, no additional incremental cost to serve you and the 12 hours a day customer, all bits for all channels are broadcast to all customers.
Whereas each additional outside their net a la carte video stream does cost, if it's at a period of peak demand. The build out for peak demand is what costs, well, everyone, including the last mile ISPs, and video does tend to coincide with or now probably creates peak demand in evenings.
Some technical solutions like pulling during off peak and storing it for later viewing are unacceptable to content providers :-(, then again, none of this matters in a good way to a last mile company who very much wants you paying them for video rather than Netflix et. al., which is all of the big US ones except Century (formerly US Worst).
Interestingly, the last time I checked, a few years ago, one of CableOne's standard capping mechanisms was only for usage at peak periods....
> The argument based on costs is that it costs a cableco, or e.g. satellite company, no additional incremental cost to serve you and the 12 hours a day customer, all bits for all channels are broadcast to all customers.
Doesn't matter. The person watching 12 hours a day is getting a far greater value from their subscription than I am, which is the same reason the (generally all-encompassing, as opposed to peak metering) caps are being argued as fair, because of the value received.
Now of course all the ISPs policies make sense when you assume their motives are to kneecap a competitor and not to fairly price their service.
If you charged Netflix, they would consider investing more money on trying to reduce the bandwidth they use:
- innovative video codec
- better encoders
- new streaming technology
Verizon chose that business model; we're just asking them to stick to it. Or they could meter. But charging both sides is bad for innovation.