Posted on 12/14/2010 6:26:14 AM PST by Gondring
For the past year, executives at big media companies have watched Netflix with growing resentment for its success in delivering movies and television shows via the Internet, for its stock price nearly quadrupling, for its chief executive being named businessperson of the year by Fortune magazine.
Now many of the companies that make the shows and movies that Netflix delivers to mailboxes, computer screens and televisions companies whose stocks have not enjoyed the same frothy rise, and whose chief executives have not won the same accolades are pushing back, arguing that the company is overhyped, and vowing to charge much more to license their content.
Its a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? said Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, in an interview last week. I dont think so.
[...]
If Netflix is to renew the Starz pact and thus keep a steady flow of Hollywood movies it will probably pay many times the current $25 million a year. Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG research, estimated a new deal could cost Netflix more than $250 million a year. Mr. Bewkes suggested a new deal may not be reached, because Netflixs subscription streaming service, which costs about $8 a month, isnt high enough for the company to pay top dollar for movies.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hmm. I’m finding them doing tricks like having season one streaming and then having to wait for cds for the rest of the years. I’m not pleased at the small number of streaming thing they have. But, I consider I’m paying for the right to the content.
Are we behind in BB speed, or just way, WAY ahead in total number of users that have to be provided for? You may be right, but it sounded like a bit of latent america bashing.
But YOU don’t know what their fixed costs are, and YOU don’t know how much data/minute the stream is pulling down, and YOU don’t know how badly the cabletown people have been gouging up till now. Look at the voice industry. For YEARS they had people convinced that it cost 25-50-75 cents per minute to transmit their voice around the world. It took someone getting in there and undercutting the HELL out of them, selling it for 2-5-10 cents, which required goonment giving up their death grip, to show that they had been ripping us blind for generations.
U.S. Net Access Not All That Speedy - USA Today
US Internet speeds still slow compared to the rest of the world - betaNews
Report: U.S. broadband speed outdated - PhysOrg
Don't be so quick to cast stones. I've worked in IT for 15 years, and we are very far behind the rest of the world in broadband speed. Japan and South Korea outnumber us in users by a long shot. This is not about use, it's about infrastructure and money.
Go look at cable company or telco capex and opex budget and tell me what you find. Sure, cost per bit transported continues to decline but volume of traffic continues to climb. Technology advances are what make that possible but the equipment and software and not to mention the labor involved isn’t cheap.
The key here is the market......
but a free market has to have willing participants who are fairly compensated and if not opt out.
Read this analysis from a guy who used to own an ISP and now trades for a living.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2226192
Argue away at your peril
Yeah, sorry about going there. I didn’t think you meant to be America bashing, but it just sounded kind of... like a throwaway comment, like we suck we suck we suck. Moreover, I wasn’t really aware of it (though I think I HAVE heard SOMETHING about it, I’m in IT too), so it was kind of a shock.
I work for a major network hub in the Tampa Bay area, and I can assure you that we’re doing everything we can to get broadband going faster. Unfortunately there are a lot of bureaucratic hoops to jump through and competitive bidding for infrastructure makes it difficult to get the right equipment in the best place. We often fight with city planners and bureaucrats, and they usually win.
The MSM folks (TV and newspapers, mostly) also have their hands in this problem. They think that if they outbid on certain infrastructure contracts and then renege on the commitment, they’re saving themselves from extinction. In reality, local TV and papers are having a lot of trouble selling ads due to the Internet. It makes sense that they have a grudge, and until that sort of bidding war crap goes away, we’re going to continue to have slow Internet connectivity.
Which was exactly my point. But it's still not on Netflix to pay more. They're not driving the demand. The consumer is.
Yeha, now that I think about it more, I saw a chalk talk through Lifehacker or something a while back in which some high technical muckety-muck from one of the ISPs or bandwidth providers explained exactly WHY we were facing a choke point in re bandwidth, and that it’s not going to be easy to work out of. It’s resulted in lots of actions like Comcast (Kabletown) putting caps on downloads, stuff like that. I was very happy with the service I used to receive from Time-Warner, but when they sold out to Kabletown, everything went to hell. Now I’m with AT&T, not extraordinarily happy with them, but the internet usually stays up and they don’t cap my downloads, they just cap my speed.
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