Tee Vee

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comcast says no to competing video services and imposes bandwidth caps

August 28, 2008 in Comcast, Open Web, Tee Vee, Time Warner Cable, Video | 26 comments

Comcast has decided to impose a 250GB/month limit on their customers. I have a lot of friends that use Comcast for their internet service provider and are likely to hit this limit, even counting fully legit data. Linux isos aren’t small. And I know that I do a lot of backups and whoisi testing that uses a decent amount of bandwidth. I’m sure I’m well past this limit. [ Note: I am a very happy Verizon FIOS user. ]

But the real story is about what this does to competitive video services. Want to get access to better, lower-cost video than Comcast cable service from somewhere like Amazon, Netflix or Hulu? Nope, welcome to the world of false scarcity. You will use their video service and you will like it.

Om calls this “the enemy of innovation” and he’s right. Part of the explosion of video, services and data via the web has come because of the growth and availability of broadband into people’s homes. What this says is “growth is fine as long as it doesn’t compete with our video offerings.”

I am reminded of the oldest story of this behaviour when AT&T didn’t want to support the Internet because they didn’t want competition to their proprietary long haul services. And rightfully so. It’s a good thing that AT&T didn’t win that battle, right?

Also, they list how many pieces of email you can send with a 250GB limit. (Huh? Seriously?) I wonder how many youtube videos or hulu videos that amounts to. Anyone know the avg size of one of those? That might make for a more interesting number.

decent article on 60 minutes

May 20, 2007 in OLPC, Tee Vee | 16 comments

Not a bad article, all in all. Bit of a personality piece on Nicholas and they used “geek” in the pejorative. But it sounds like they got most of the message. Except they missed the connection of why Intel’s tactics are dangerous to the project. By hiding the true costs of their laptops they are undermining the ability for a huge number of children to receive low cost laptops. Are they really going to dispense laptops at a $100-200 loss each to a billion kids? I think that’s the important question. Actually, ask an Intel shareholder if they would be willing to back that kind of action.

Holy crap, the comments on the CBS website are deeply ignorant. People are pissed that they can’t buy the laptops for the US. Compared to most of the world, the US does not have poor people. Not like that. The what about me attitude of most of the posts makes me very sad indeed.

unlost

May 13, 2006 in Tee Vee

Since April 18th I’ve watched 45 episodes of lost. One more and I’m caught up and I will have to wait a week between episodes. I’m not sure what that will do to me.