For whatever reason, this topic has come up a lot the past few weeks in both the news and in my personal online social circle. We've discussed on Google Buzz and in the comments of a post on The Secret Lair, and we've heard about the ridiculous Comcast/NBC merger.
I don't keep secret the fact that I hate Comcast. When we moved to Connecticut, I did a lot of research into options for high speed internet. I really wanted to avoid Comcast. But today, I'm a Comcast customer, because there are no other options for high speed internet in my area. I contacted AT&T UVerse yesterday to re-confirm that their service isn't available where I live. If this isn't a monopoly, then I guess I'm misunderstanding the definition of the word. Maybe it's not a monopoly because I can get dial-up internet if I so choose. In any event, I have Comcast for internet access but not cable TV. And as soon as any other option presents itself, I will drop Comcast like Chunk dropped that painting in Mikey's attic.
My television options right now are Netflix streaming and Hulu Plus, and I'm not alone. It looks like Netflix streaming takes up something like 20% of the country's bandwidth during peak hours. And as IPTV becomes more prevalent, those bandwidth caps that the ISPs enforce will become more of a big deal. In addition to Netflix and Hulu, AT&T UVerse, XBox, and the Playstation Network have video options, and Fox looks to have a new video service coming to game consoles in the future.
But as I've repeated so often over the past few days, the television distribution model is broken. That's it. It's straight up broken. So many people I know are dropping cable in favor of more flexible and less expensive alternatives. Cable television does offer some flexibility in that they'll sell you their DVR for time shifting and offer on-demand programming, but how expensive is that? I'd be surprised to learn that you can find anything decent for less than $60 or $80 per month. As it stands now, I pay less than $30 for Netflix and Hulu. There are certain shows that I'd like to be watching that I can't get, but there is no way for me to get those shows without paying for hundreds of other shows in which I have zero interest.
And with ISPs like Comcast becoming larger and even more monopolistic, our options will decrease and our costs increase. Comcast is one of the most anti-consumer (anti-customer?) companies I've ever known. The bandwidth caps they impose may not be the biggest deal today, but as more people begin to stream video of increasingly higher quality and more people begin to use the clous services that Comcast itself advertises, bandwidth will become more and more of an issue. The battle between Netflix and Comcast is going to be like the Olympians versus the Titans, and it will be the mortal consumers who will suffer, and probably be banished to Tartarus.