

Netflix Inc. May Have Found the Magic Bullet to Kill Comcast's Connection Fees - blamonet
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/29/netflix-inc-may-have-found-the-magic-bullet-to-kil.aspx

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MBCook
I don't think P2P is a real solution.

With no Net Neutrality, what's to prevent Comcast from blocking P2P traffic?
They already like data caps, they could also shrink the upload cap to make it
too expensive for users to be able to afford.

Then you have the catalog problem. That works well for when the new episode of
Orange is the New Black comes out, but what about smaller shows and old movies
that may only have a half-dozen people watching them at any given time?

I'd say Netflix's best chance in all this is to mobile their customers to
complain to regulators with some sort of banner in the Netflix apps.

Remember when the internet blacked its self out for a day a year or two ago
over Net Neutrality? Remember how big companies like Comcast complained that
Google and Facebook and others were "cheating" in getting users to complain
about the issue?

That's where their power lies. Netflix has a _ton_ of users. Either doing that
or putting up messages during buffering like "Having problems? Comast isn't
working hard for you." from time to time.

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mherkender
> With no Net Neutrality, what's to prevent Comcast from blocking P2P traffic?

Encryption.

> but what about smaller shows and old movies that may only have a half-dozen
> people watching them at any given time?

A user could distribute things that they're not watching.

> I'd say Netflix's best chance in all this is to mobile their customers to
> complain to regulators with some sort of banner in the Netflix apps.

That's a good idea too.

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ninkendo
Encryption doesn't matter, all they need to do is traffic shape everything
that's not "web" (by that I mean strictly 80 or 443) and they can effectively
kill any peer-to-peer thing that netflix could possibly come up with, while
still maintaining an illusion of good service for 99.9% of the rest of their
customers' traffic. It would deprioritize bittorrent too, so two birds with
one stone as far as Comcast goes.

Let's face it: almost _everything_ an average internet user does, measured by
number of packets, is on 80 or 443 (except bittorrent, but comcast very likely
already deprioritizes that.) Maybe a sprinkling of email traffic here and
there for the few who don't use a web mail provider. I'd actually be quite
shocked if Comcast _didn 't_ have traffic shaping in place that deprioritized
non-web traffic. It would make smart business sense.

Which means the only way Netflix could do P2P is to put peers behind port 443,
which can only work for one connection per peer. (And good luck teaching all
netflix subscribers how to get NAT working on their routers.) Or they'd have
to do a nat busting service, which wouldn't be peer to peer any more, and
would open them right back up to Comcast's throttling.

At the end of the day, if nobody's forcing Comcast to stay neutral, they can
deprioritize whatever traffic they want. Who's going to stop them? What are
you going to do, sign up for a competing ISP?

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MBCook
Comcast knows what addresses are theirs. They could easily apply traffic
shaping on intra-network traffic. Allow enough that some games and things like
Skype would work OK but any decent bandwidth application could be throttled.

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jamesbrownuhh
This article seems quite naive. Painting P2P traffic as something "which
Comcast cannot block" ignores both history and the reason why Netflix paid for
direct peering with Comcast in the first place. It's not that their traffic
was being "blocked", just that it was coming in on the same overloaded pipes
as other general Internet traffic. While Comcast customers might not notice a
web page taking a few milliseconds longer to load, they certainly notice the
difference in video streaming quality, and hence why the new peering
arrangement made a difference.

Shifting all the traffic to P2P most likely would send Netflix traffic back
into the overloaded slow lanes again - and if anything makes it all the MORE
likely to be further slowed down and deprioritised for reasons. Phrases like
"Internet traffic of a type often used for piracy" are all that needs to be
said to justify whatever further shaping, blocking, and other indignities
could be applied to it.

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gremlinsinc
Why not reskin popcorn time, add login/auth system to verified you're a paid
netflix member, and you're done. Make app versions that work on all platforms.

Or netflix could use anonymous ip's/domains for their servers --who says
netflix needs to broadcast to comcast--hey it's me netflix sharing some movies
w/ my customers, thanks!

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ianhawes
Does anyone have any idea what the usage rates are for mobile Netflix vs.
desktop/console/set-top Netflix? Skype has been moving away from a p2p
architecture because of a surge in the number of mobile users.

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Atroxide
Not sure but I strictly use a mobile device but only to cast to my ChromeCast
(so only on WiFi). So I guess the Wifi vs data is more important than desktop
vs mobile.

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gregimba
Something like 13% of comcasts outgoing data is bittorrent already. The issue
is most people won't like the idea of having their upload bandwidth being
without their knowledge or permission.

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Spittie
You're giving people too much credit, most won't even know how Netflix work.
Nobody complains about Spotify, and they use (used?) p2p too.

What Netflix neet do do is to use some smart protocol like utp and have sane
limits by default to not saturate the uplink and make other services slow. If
they manage to do that, then most users will be happy. Slap in there an on/off
checkbox and a manual bandwidth limiter for the advanced users, and even most
of those that know how p2p works will not complain.

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gregimba
Spotify doesn't do that anymore because while it makes sense technically it
did not make business sense. Most users would not appreciate this even if it
had no appreciable affect on their bandwidth.

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dagamer34
Spotify had to stop P2P because it makes no sense on mobile devices.

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tmikaeld
Connection limits coming in.. 7... 6... 5.. 4.. 3.. 2. 1 BOOM!

