Netflix wipes blood of Comcast/TWC from its blade, charges toward AT&T/DirecTV Netflix is lobbying US watchdog the FCC to reject the proposed merger between AT&T and DirecTV. The over-the-top vid streamer said that should AT&T be allowed to scoop DirecTV for $49bn, the resulting broadcast behemoth would be able to throw its weight around and extract premium fees from streaming upstarts like Netflix. To …
<rant>Combining AT&T and Direc TV would be sort of like merging two criminal gangs into one new super-gang. It would NOT be a benefit to anyone except, possibly, the gangsters. For years I was stuck with AT&T and had to pay them every month for "long distance" that I never used. (I'm not talking about the government-mandated charge, but a separate charge.) They also provide some of the slowest Internet access around here.
Their business people don't even know what they're doing. They keep mailing me flyers for a fiber service, but their engineers say there is no fiber here and no plans to run fiber here.</rant>
Sorry. I'll get my coat now and go home quietly.
"...streaming upstarts like Netflix."
(start hip disco music)
Fuck it, I'm an upstart too! Sure, I've been reading this BBS over decade, but I don't give a damn...I'm an upstart. You might think it makes no sense at all for me to be an upstart, so what if you're right...I'm an upstart! You don't have to read what I post, you could read about Internet Explorer, haven't you heard about the "relaunch"...it's an upstart!
Netflix has been streaming media for over a decade, about 12 years (+-1). It was one of the advertised "features" for the launch of the Xbox 360. Wait, a decade later we have Xbox ONE.......it's an "upstart"!
Do the UpStart!!
Cha Cha
Do the UpStart!
Cha cah
They claim they're an "upstart"....have they checked their market cap? They've been around over a decade as the previous poster mentioned - that's a couple centuries in Silicon Valley years!
They're also worrying about something theoretical for AT&T they think might possibly happen. Yeah, they might become a major broadband provider, IF they make all the massive investments they say they plan to make. I guess Verizon is just planning on letting AT&T own the wireless broadband market? Same for Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular? AT&T will not be without competition, and where they offer broadband now they are not without competition - because every market where they offer DSL there's a cable company offering internet too.
The coming of fixed wireless will mean rural customers will have more broadband competition than most city/suburb dwellers by the early 2020s.
Here in the UK I always used to be jealous of the US dial-up and later BB market. It always seemed so much better, cheaper and faster. Especially th free local calls and local PoPs.
Recently I just got a free upgrade from my cableco from 60Mb/s to 100Mb/s. Just because they want to prove they are the fastest. (they do offer faster speeds too)
I guess it partly depends on where you live but the UK is generally densely populated so there are usually multiple ISPs serving most areas (rural is another matter, even some town outskirts). I gather the US market is much more of a collection of local monopolies with one at most two or maybe three suppliers in many areas other than large cities.
What it looks like from the perspective of 2015 is a leapfrog effect. At some stage it becomes time to upgrade the network and naturally they use the latest tech to do that although I suspect that won't be quite so obvious in the future when it's all FTTC or FTTH.
So called 3rd world countries often have state of the art networks because they were installing from new, not trying to eak out more ROI from an existing network like BT did with ISDN thus delaying DSL by a few years here or cable BB because the UK cable network arrived much later than the US one and so remained analogue to get the ROI before following the US digital/DOCCIS conversion.
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