Quote:
Originally Posted by nfotiu
It gets absorbed into the content provider's cost, and sure some of that cost gets passed to the consumer in the subscription fees.
However, Netflix is getting a lot more efficient about how this is delivered anyway:
http://blog.netflix.com/2012/06/anno...t-network.html
But, it still costs pennies to deliver the content compared to what everyone is spending for carriage fees for channels they don't watch. |
That doesn't address the single most constrained and expensive part of the network. Netflix peering with the ISP's at the head end helps upstream, but it's the downstream network to the consumers that has to do the brunt of the heavy lifting, and that is the most bandwidth constrained. That's where the real costs to the ISP's are - maintaining, upgrading, and rolling out the distributed network that exists between their data centers and the consumer.
Netflix essentially gets that part of the network for free, irrespective of the peering arrangements they are willing to make through OpenConnect.
And that's why we still need pay-per-byte internet - the ISP's need to be able to recoup the costs associated with delivering content from places like Netflix that Netflix doesn't pay for. Otherwise, you are right back to a situation where the ISP's are deciding which providers to allow on their network, based on how much the providers pay into the bandwidth costs for the load they create, which is the antithesis of net neutrality.