
AT&T will lower the quality of most video to 480p starting next year - doener
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/t-lower-quality-most-video-192210655.html
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mikeash
The HN title is missing two key words: "by default." You can turn it off. I'm
not particularly happy with what they're doing, but there's a fairly big
difference between forcing it on everyone and allowing people to opt-out.

~~~
gcr
T-Mobile started the slippery slope and legitimazed the idea of limited video
with their "Binge On" program. If you turn on "Binge On", you only get down-
sampled, bandwidth-limited video. The trade-off was that they agreed not to
charge you for watching downsampled video. They also let you turn this feature
on or off, so there's an upside.

But. There's a trick.

T-mobile now offers a single plan, "T-Mobile ONE." All videos are downsampled
by default and you can't disable that without paying extra.

The customers' wallets have spoken.

~~~
dogma1138
How can they override the video quality over HTTPS? even if they point you to
their CDN can't you just DNS hack through this?

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gcr
If a video hosting website wanted to join T-Mobile's "Binge On" program, they
will agree to host their video in such a way that T-Mobile can detect which
stream to throttle. This could mean serving it from certain hosts, serving
videos over HTTP, or some other out-of-band pen-and-paper agreement between
T-Mobile and the video website. See here for technical details for video
hosting services: [http://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-
Vid...](http://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-Video-
Technical-Criteria-March-2016.pdf)

Lots of video providers went out of their way to jump on board. It had the
support of many industry players because "Binge On", at the time, was a net
positive for customers.

Now that the infrastructure is in place, T-Mobile can drop the nice marketing.

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chipperyman573
This move seems pretty pro-consumer (even if ATT did it for their own
benefit).

Data caps _on wireless transmission_ (not fiber to your house) are a technical
requirement. There's only so much bandwith space, and it's being demanded more
than ever before. So, carriers create incentives to use less data, including
data caps/limits. If grandma wants to watch House of Cards on her phone, she
might not realize that, for whatever reason (poor reception, the power cable
fell out of the router, etc), her phone switched over to 4G. This will protect
users like her from using up ALL her data at once.

------
ams6110
480p is as good as the best pre-HD analog TV, or standard DVDs, and better
than VHS which everyone was happy to use back in the day. And certainly fine
for most things on a screen as small as a mobile device. I don't really see
what there is to complain about, especially as it's optional.

I'd gladly trade higher bandwidth costs, pixelation, freezing and skipping HD
video for smooth 480p for most things.

~~~
tinus_hn
It is not the job of the communications provider to decide what the users get
to transmit. And they most certainly shouldn't be in the business of
manipulating the users' communication which is what they are doing to change
the video resolution.

Anyway this whole discussion will soon be moot as everything moves to SSL and
AT&T can only decide wether to transmit it completely or not at all. As they
should.

~~~
chipperyman573
One typical solution to this is just to limit ALL bandwith to youtube.com,
nflxvideo.net (Netflix's CDN), etc. Then, you rely on the app to intelligantly
downgrade video quality for you. SSL won't solve this issue, only a VPN will.

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errantspark
This seems like something that's really easy to get mad about; but given it's
optional nature and the fact that you're watching these videos on a tiny phone
screen actually seems like almost universally a good thing.

~~~
shostack
It is optional for now while they get things in place to follow T-Mobile and
introduce a plan where this is the default and you have to pay more to unlock
higher quality video. Then you remove plan with the free unlock option or just
increase its price to make sure to instead ARPU to the desired level.

Classic boiling of the frog and T-Mobile is a glimpse into the future of where
at&t is going with this.

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samfisher83
Customers can choose to disable it. Given data caps it might not be a bad
thing to have it on.

Whether you think they are good or bad tmobile has had a massive impact on the
cellphone industry. They were the first to remove subsidies which all the
carriers copied. Now the carriers are copying their throttling model.

~~~
shostack
Yes, it is good at helping with data caps that carriers imposed. So you pay
them extra for more bandwidth at a ridiculous rate or pay them for the
"privilege" of getting higher quality video like T-Mobile.

They win through higher fees both ways and consumers are once again screwed
through artificial constraints and lack of competition.

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darkhorn
This is another reason to use HTTPS.

~~~
toomuchtodo
HTTPS doesn't mask the source IP block of the content. Pretty easy to throttle
Youtube, Netflix, etc based on their CDN blocks.

~~~
ryandvm
The original comment is absolutely correct in that if the video stream is
delivered via HTTPS it is impossible to downsample it. Now, whether YouTube et
al actually use HTTPS for the video stream, I don't know...

~~~
toomuchtodo
Not true. You can throttle packets by source or destination IP block, and by
throttling the connection, the player will be forced down to a lower bitrate
rendition.

This is how T-Mobile performs their throttling, and could be done to any class
of traffic.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-
mobiles...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-
bingeon-optimization-just-throttling-applies)

~~~
WhitneyLand
So what happens when there is only one bitrate available at 1080p and it's
encrypted?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Your player is going to stutter hard if it doesn't wait to preload enough of
the content.

Disclaimer: My last job was infrastructure at an Internet-only video news org.

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op00to
I can't wait for this feature. I know unlimited (reliable) mobile data is
pretty much done for in the US, so anything that lets me economise is awesome.
You can turn it off. This is a positive thing for me.

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shmerl
It should be illegal. Same as unnecessary data caps.

~~~
op00to
Why?

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shmerl
For a range of reasons, from violating Net neutrality, to anti-trust.

~~~
op00to
How does it violate FCC regulations? You can turn it off.

~~~
shmerl
It doesn't matter. Besides, most have no clue it's even in place.

