“Last week I came to the realization that with Netflix and iTunes, I would be able to cut out the $50 portion of my cable TV bill and ditch the 80 or so channels I never watch, including 3 shopping channels, 3 sports channels, 6 family channels, numerous foreign language channels, and one Lifetime Channel for Women that my fiance tortures me with. Farewell Melissa Gilbert, Rachael Ray, and Paula Deen! You are thus banished from my home,” Alan Graham blogs for ZDNet.
Graham writes, “I’m currently interested in about 6 shows, all of which it turns out I can get on iTunes. Plus, Netflix handles all of my movie needs. If I’m generous with my iTunes figures, it adds up to about $300 in purchases each year, versus the $600 I pay for all of the ‘variety’ that Comcast provides me. The old model of just piping junk into my home simply doesn’t make sense to me anymore.”
Graham writes, “I called Comcast and asked to disconnect the cable television part of my bill and just keep my high speed internet. They were very nice and said, no problem. They would be happy to do that.”
“Oh yeah…btw…we also have to cut your 6Mbps connection down to 3Mbps, and we’re gonna have to charge you more money for it. Or, we can offer you basic cable and you get to keep your high speed connection for just $64.”
Graham writes, “So wait, you are giving me the choice of charging me more money for less features, or charging me more money and giving me less value? I guess I’ll take what I don’t want…to keep what I do want. Thank goodness for deregulation!”
Graham writes, “Of course as long as companies like Comcast own the pipes, don’t expect any of this to change. But this experience got me thinking about Net Neutrality. What I wonder is, as services like iTunes, Joost, Netflix, and others begin to make greater inroads into the Comcast cash cow, and as the telecoms begin to provide cable tv options as well, will they be choking off the value of competing services by slowing down the pipes?”
Graham writes, “This seems like an anti-competitive tactic and is something we need to start looking closely at now. iTunes may be a juggernaut at the moment, but they can’t compete with Comcast and other cable/telecom companies, if they start choking off the connection. And that’s not just bad for Apple, Google, or Yahoo!, it hurts every other company out there, especially the smaller ones.”
More in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “BB” for the heads up.]
Tour of Apple’s new Apple TV (3:58):
Related articles:
ZDNet’s Graham: Apple TV hits a number of sweet spots, poised to make a big impact – January 25, 2007
RUMOR: Apple TV sales blowing away Apple’s internal expectations – January 25, 2007
Steve Jobs: Apple TV is the ‘DVD player for the 21st century’ – January 22, 2007
Apple TV beats out iPod, hits top spot on Apple Store sales chart – January 19, 2007
Report: first batch of 100,000 Apple TVs to ship this month – January 11, 2007
Steve Jobs moves to control the living room with Apple TV – January 10, 2007
Analyst Bajarin: Apple’s iPhone and Apple TV are industry game changers – January 09, 2007
Apple premieres Apple TV: movies, TV shows, music & photos on your big screen TV – January 09, 2007
effwerd: Agreed on Amanda. Yum.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” /> Well at least there is Atlantis, plus the new Star Wars TV show coming….yeah, I’m a geek.
Let’s hear it for city wide WiFi. It’s our constitutional right! Right?
Let’s hear it for national WiFi. Wherever there’s cell phone service there should be WiFi.
Politicians today can twist the Constitution enough to wring out whatever rights (and powers) they want. Surely they can “find” a right to free government-supported wireless broadband. It’ll be handled under a new Department of Information Freedom. Scary, huh?
As for cable? There’s a reason it’s buried. It’s dead.
I believe Tempe, AZ. is a free Wi-Fi city. It’s doing quite well too. Wi-Fi is def the future. Can you imagine what the landscape will look like in 10, 20…50 years?? (without any foreseen Apocolypse)
I tend to be a reserved optimist. I think the future of communication could, and hopefully will, be amazing. The business models that exist today will be long gone. Of course, there is always a bit of bad with the good.
<done waxing philosopical>
There are a lot of argmuents on both sides of the Net Neutrality concept. I lean towards Net Neutrality because I feel that the independent companies should not be able to slow down traffic that they don’t want coming through. As an example, what if Microsoft ended up making a deal with Comcast to slow down Apple.com traffic, including iTunes? Suddenly Zune Town can deliver songs and movies 5x faster than iTunes store. Not right, especially since a lot of the infrastructure of the Internet was built by government funds.
That’s my take. It would be interesting to hear the side of someone on this board that disagrees with Net Neutrality.
Google has been quietly building its own fibre optic infrastructure. They have data centers with major capability built into mobile shipping containors. Don’t be surprised if free Google WiFi starts popping up all over the place.
That’s gonna piss off some phone and cable companies!
Last year in my neighborhood Verizon installed fiber optic service that competes head-to-head with Comcast (Bomcast, Spamcast, Con-cast, what you will), which continues to receive a generous number of complaints. Both companies offer packages with television shows.
Apple providing a carrier-independent option can only be good for consumers in this market. It means that comparison shopping for broadband is more likely to focus on the fundamentals of speed, price, stability and customer service.
That’s not what the Net Neutrality debate is about. The issue is whether ISPs can charge more to those companies using their pipes to sell bandwith-intensive content or services. Or to charge more for providing other types of new high-end services. The type of thing you’re talking about could easily be prohibited (e.g., no favoritism toward particular companies) and none of the opponents of Net Neutrality would mind. The real rationale for opposing Net Neutrality is so that ISPs could charge more to higher-end users, which would encourage/permit ISP providers to increase their investment in improving the quality of service. Over time, this would also benefit lower-end users as well, as prices drop for older services and they are replaced by newer higher-end services. The underlying principle is the same one that allows Apple to charge more for a iPod w/video than a Nano or a Shuffle. Over time, some of the features of the higher end/more expensive products will also find their way to the lower end products/services. The fundamental choice is between:
A) more freedom/inequality/all users better off over time, and;
B) less freedom/equality/all users worse off over time.
Kate
world wide WiFi or bugger it
Q,
You beat me to it. Google is going to absolutely kill that part of the service provider industry that does not provide the desired services to its customers — what a concept. You don’t think that with Google’s brains that they will sit by and let the Comcasts, Verizons and Microsofts of the world cut off their oxygen, do you? Google already has much of the massive infrastructure that it needs to compete and will be partnering with companies like Apple to get them going in the take over.
I’ve been predicting this on this site for quite some time. Cringely has recently written the same opinion. The days of the bandwidth strangling behavior of the service – bend over, here comes your service – providers is ending. They will die from the consequences of their own greed.
agreed with LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son. Done days.
I agree with you – Net Neutrality is about the ISPs wanting to charge people that use more bandwidth more money.
Guess what? They already do. If you want to provide a faster connection to your customers, you have to buy more bandwidth. If a T1 line isn’t cutting it for your content, then you have to buy a T3 line. The T3 is WAY more expensive than a T1 line. Some companies have several T3 lines. There are even faster options available, but I used these 2 as an example.
So if a company is already paying the ISP for bandwidth, what is Net Neutrality about?
Charging the company AGAIN, so that their content is delivered with a higher quality of service (lower latency, less dropped packets, etc). If Google wants the better customer experience, they have to pay for it.
Which as I pointed out, they are already doing by buying huge pipes to the Internet.
Net Neutrality is about keeping the ISPs from double charging companies for their Internet connection AND QoS.
While some of the big Internet visionaries have railed against Net Neutrality, I think that they are wrong, because I don’t want to have my favorite web service be crippled by an ISP because they didn’t have enough cash left over after paying for the outrageous connection fees to also pay for the QoS fees.
I predicted in 2002 that cable/satellite and newspaper/magazines days were numbered. Who did I predict this to? The company I work for, which owns several cable systems and newspapers. They are only numbered in the way they are used now.
I think whoever fibers a town will own it-so to speak. But that ownership will only be as a conduit to the internet-if it can sustain that much traffic-to be used for communication and entertainment. Why would a cable system exist to offer HBO when you can go to HBO.com (eventually) to download/subscribe/rent a movie? Same with other channels. Why offer over the air TV channels when it would be much cheaper and simpler to be online?
Ditto for newspapers, whose role will change to become a gatherer of LOCAL news. More and more people get most of their national and international news from the net, but local news still has to be collected, and as a result, people will be in a much better shape to find out what is going on, possibly live, in their area. Wish you could travel cross country to see your hometowns Christmas parade? It’s online via the local news/newspaper that has morphed, and is put on the net by the cable/phone company. Satellite TV will die, even quicker if broadband is ever offered through the REA power lines.
This leads to another problem/situation/solution/answer, and that is the company that maintains the fiber will become a regulated utility, for good or bad, or both. This will be done because of the threat of monopolies, gouging, and so forth.
Another scenerio would be for towns to build the systems themselves and contract out the maintenance. This one seems like a good idea on the surfce, but I think it would be so over controlled, that the appeaance of Big Bro would stymie its model.
The demise of the internet caused by Apple TV?!?!?!?
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Not even a World Revolves Around Apple Mac Geek like me can buy that one!
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That’s gonna piss off some phone and cable companies!
If Google does a mass deployment of free WiFi…
…many phone companies, cable companies, and ISP’s will be dead before they can hope to react. Imagine, many billions of dollars of hard infrastructure, obsolete overnight.
The dinosaurs were probably pissed when the skies went dark…
Not even a World Revolves Around Apple Mac Geek like me can buy that one!
Not so fast.
There is tremendous demand for broadband, and iTunes and TV are sizable enablers of that demand.
There is also a serious lack of “last-mile” connections, and the telcos and cable companies are, through their own stupidity and greed, jerk-milking their own cash cows, their own customers. Like Microsoft users, many would leave in a moment if given a choice.
Apple is not going to kill the Internet. Apple is only part of a force that’s pushing old-school comm/media companies and creaky land-based connections into the past.
If Google does a mass deployment of free WiFi…
and we find out a few generations from now these signals are actually mutating our genes and we become flesh eating monsters…
oh wait – we already are (to a cow.)
: ^)
I still don’t quite understand net neutrality… anything that passes congress I get really cautious of.
“I’m currently interested in about 6 shows, all of which it turns out I can get on iTunes. Plus, Netflix handles all of my movie needs. If I’m generous with my iTunes figures, it adds up to about $300 in purchases each year, versus the $600 I pay for all of the ‘variety’ that Comcast provides me.”
The numbers don’t add up. If you watch six shows a week, that’s 24 episodes a month, which cost $48 at $1.99 each. That’s $576 a year, or $24 less than the $600 the writer was spending on Comcast. According to my arithmetic, he’s saving a whopping $2 on month while trading all of Comcast’s variety for six lousy shows. Doesn’t sound like such a great deal to me!
And that’s without even considering the cost of his Netflix subscription.
“greed kills”
You make an interesting point. If what your saying is Apple is forcing others to push the envelope (including those “last-mile” connections) then I agree.
Apple TV is going to do to Cable and Satellite what the iPod did to CDs… get ready.
“The numbers don’t add up”
Most series only have 26 episodes per year don’t they, not 52.
When I first paid for cable television, I received seven channels for $5.00 a month. Now, I am obligated to pay more than $60.00 a month to receive the sports and news channels that I would want. I sold my television 5 years ago and feel better for it. I have no desire to subsidize programming that I have no desire to watch, so what other choice do I have?
The author must be a little myopic. All he had to do was say that he was going to get his video from satellite, and his internet from the telco and Comcast would have caved. I don’t have cable so it doesn’t matter to me,
And that is the best advice of all! I have comcast and they are constantly trying to get me to upgrade to their premium packages (Currently) they just provide me with Internet I pay $61 for that. I get TV from Dish Network & Phone from Vonage. I explained all of this to Comcast and they were not to please but oh well. I am really Anti-Cable they try to Mafia you into switch to their “Crappy” service. Their only Saving grace which has very little to do with this article is the fact they are in talks with Tivo.. But there again I have a Lifetime subscription to Tivo so it really doesn’t affect me. I am convinced however that Comcast and other like them will throttle their bandwidth if people start to use the full potential of their connections.
People,
Let me explain this from my view point as a Comcast employee.
Prices continue to go up based on what the content providers charge or
what they are willing to pay to access Comcast’s 24 million homes. Yes, Comcast is the biggest followed by guess who, Time Warner.
Understand that Comcast Digital Premium package without movie channels contains 250 channel including free On-Demand which allows you to watch shows you you had missed and control them like a VCR or DVR. I don’t think people know what they aregetting and no one is telling them at Comcast. Take a look at channel 1900-1998 it is very cool.
Anyway, the real point is has anyone tried to download a full season of Desperate Housewifes? I have and it took 2 days over a fractional T-1. Comcast is not worried about AppleTV taking over the market. Comcast is the fastest consumer connection on the web 6-8MB per second and soon 16mb burst for these types of downloads. $61.00 for T-1 speed is pretty cheap compared to $450.00 a month for real a T-1 without the servers, protection, and access to the Web.
I love Apple and will continue to sell and service their products..I think Comcast
will adapt to the competition but in the long run they own the pipes and content.
CP
Comcast sucks. I pay $115 per month just to get one channel, ESPN-2, (and internet) which is considered a basic channel everywhere else but here. I’ve called customer service enough times to learn all their techniques to avoid giving service. My internet connection goes down every weekend without fail. I will go DSL before long and Comcast will go the way of MCI who also thought the way to success was screwing customers.