steven36 Posted March 25, 2016 Share Posted March 25, 2016 AT&T and Verizon were recently taking heat over their quality of Netflix videos. Now it looks like blame may lie somewhere else. March 24 (Reuters) - Netflix Inc said it had been lowering the quality of its video for customers watching its service on wireless networks such as AT&T and Verizon Communications for more than five years, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The Journal quoted Netflix as saying it had limited its videos to most wireless carriers across the globe, capping them at 600 kiliobits-per-second, to “protect consumers from exceeding mobile data caps.” The company also said that it does not throttle videos for T-Mobile US Inc and Sprint Corp users because they had “more consumer friendly policies,” the Journal reported. “We’re outraged to learn that Netflix is apparently throttling video for their AT&T customers without their knowledge or consent,” Jim Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs wrote in an email. Netflix did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted March 25, 2016 Share Posted March 25, 2016 9 hours ago, steven36 said: to “protect consumers from exceeding mobile data caps.” ah this is so cool. a company that cares about me and mine! I do so love it when corporations and governments "protect" me from the big bad world and its misleading ways! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeetPirate Posted March 27, 2016 Share Posted March 27, 2016 On 3/25/2016 at 3:53 PM, Mantis said: ah this is so cool. a company that cares about me and mine! I do so love it when corporations and governments "protect" me from the big bad world and its misleading ways! People tend to cry about everything regardless of which way it goes. For example if you were on AT&T you would cry if you watched 1 movie on Netflix and spent 4GB of mobile data because if you watched a few movies then that would leave you with a huge phone bill you didn't want to pay. The argument then would be that hey if it's an H.264 stream then why not lower the video bit rate so that it shows in a good enough quality but uses 25% of the data, OMG what an amazing idea if only Netflix had not thought of this already OMG OMG life changing idea! So it won't matter either way, people will cry. I'm sure you don't see the value in this because it does not affect you, it affects me because I pay for mobile data so yes I am quite happy that I can enjoy a few Netflix movies at HD quality without having to take out a second mortgage to pay my phone bill. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SnakeMasteR Posted March 27, 2016 Share Posted March 27, 2016 I understand why they did that but consent is the keyword. They offer a paid service afterall and a service not able to communicate with customers what they are doing or work out options to give the best deal for the money or equally the best as it costs the same money thru all possible platforms isn't really good. At least they consider changes for the future and try to give more transparent and upfront options to the customer base, after 5 years sneak-mode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CODYQX4 Posted March 27, 2016 Share Posted March 27, 2016 5 hours ago, LeetPirate said: People tend to cry about everything regardless of which way it goes. For example if you were on AT&T you would cry if you watched 1 movie on Netflix and spent 4GB of mobile data because if you watched a few movies then that would leave you with a huge phone bill you didn't want to pay. The argument then would be that hey if it's an H.264 stream then why not lower the video bit rate so that it shows in a good enough quality but uses 25% of the data, OMG what an amazing idea if only Netflix had not thought of this already OMG OMG life changing idea! So it won't matter either way, people will cry. I'm sure you don't see the value in this because it does not affect you, it affects me because I pay for mobile data so yes I am quite happy that I can enjoy a few Netflix movies at HD quality without having to take out a second mortgage to pay my phone bill. True but it would better if they didn't pretend bandwidth was as scarce as it is and set such overpriced caps. I know that an entire city can't stream Netflix at once but the caps are a joke. I can download a terabyte in a month on old crappy cable lines that probably won't hit 100Mbps+ for a decade but brand new 4G equipment will burn to ash unless they charge $20/GB overage? Go 2MB over on their cheapest/most capped plan? $20 for 300MB, and fuck you you communist peasant that doesn't roll over because we know you don't have options because of monopolies. AT&T just gave my unlimited data on 4 lines by switching to DirecTV. Obviously they have more bandwidth to work with. 22GB and then they might throttle but that's 88GB across the 4 lines unthrottled. Total bandwidth shortage unless you buy their service and then the faucets run free? The bill would double, maybe triple if you got a share plan at 100GB without DirecTV. It actually reduced my bill because my old plan with unlimited for just me was from the era where they still bent you over for text and minutes. There's something wrong when your phone bill was costing more than Water+Gas+Electric bills combined. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CODYQX4 Posted March 27, 2016 Share Posted March 27, 2016 20 minutes ago, n0_risk! said: I understand why they did that but consent is the keyword. They offer a paid service afterall and a service not able to communicate with customers what they are doing or work out options to give the best deal for the money or equally the best as it costs the same money thru all possible platforms isn't really good. At least they consider changes for the future and try to give more transparent and upfront options to the customer base, after 5 years sneak-mode. Yeah, let's force some degradation on the down low because we know everyone will blame the other guy because he's an asshole and nobody likes him. -Netflix concerning AT&T. They could have just thrown a popup on app start. Do you want to pay hundreds to get the highest quality on your tiny 4-5 inch screen that will be hard to notice 720p vs 1080p on, or do you want compression and/or throttling so you don't get reamed by your cell service? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeetPirate Posted March 28, 2016 Share Posted March 28, 2016 I'm not sure that consent from the user is required though, isn't it all linked to the options you set on your Netflix account under playback settings? I keep mines on auto to automatically adjust the video quality based on the available bandwidth. I have to agree that it does appear that they are trying to make Netflix look like the bad guy here but I remember not long ago AT&T had "unlimited" data plans that were capped to 250Kbps after you use the first 1GB or something like that. They only lifted the throttling cap to 22GB recently after the lawsuits came. From what I've read Netflix intends to give users the option soon: Quote Netflix now plans to shift some of that control to viewers themselves. In May, it expects to make a "data saver" feature for mobile apps available to some subscribers that would let them choose either to stream more, but lower-quality, video if they have a smaller-capacity data plan or to increase video quality if they have a less-restrictive plan. So now customers will have a choice in the matter of being anally raped by their mobile service provider. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CODYQX4 Posted March 28, 2016 Share Posted March 28, 2016 15 minutes ago, LeetPirate said: I'm not sure that consent from the user is required though, isn't it all linked to the options you set on your Netflix account under playback settings? I keep mines on auto to automatically adjust the video quality based on the available bandwidth. I have to agree that it does appear that they are trying to make Netflix look like the bad guy here but I remember not long ago AT&T had "unlimited" data plans that were capped to 250Kbps after you use the first 1GB or something like that. They only lifted the throttling cap to 22GB recently after the lawsuits came. From what I've read Netflix intends to give users the option soon: So now customers will have a choice in the matter of being anally raped by their mobile service provider. I don't know about Netflix, as I don't have it, but the unlimited throttle mark was 5GB even if it would have cost you less to get a 5GB limited plan. ... and you've never been able to tether on it without 3rd party methods. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.