Someone made an excellent point on the radio: they market this as a "fairness" tool to ensure people who overuse thier services are not paying to little, while people who use the service very little are not overcharged. Well, I watch 2-3 shows a week on various cable channels, but I pay the same as someone who keeps 5 HDTVs on all the time and consumes massive bandwidth that way. I don't see them putting any caps on TV usage, nor do I see them offering a-la-carte options so I can buy the 5 damn channels that I watch and not pay for 1000 that I don't. I don't even speak the language of 10 of the channels, why do I pay for that? How is that fair? But apparantly, bandwidth for downloads is a limited resource; bandwidth for TV is unlimited to the point of forcing content on people. BS.
PS, I live in Austin, and the minute they roll out caps at TW, AT&T will get a call from me.
Well, the technology is different, and so while the analogy is good, its not perfect.
With regular cable tv, you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth (channels) that are always streamed to your tv's, only watch a certain amount at a time (DirecTV's 8 sports channels at a time mucks things up a bit). If you have the TV on all day, you only consume.......
....screw it, they are both complicated (with OnDemand and multiple tvs and phone and such). You are right. TV takes up way more bandwidth (Comcast is even compressing HD channels even more, they already look like crap). If cable had better infrastructure (like Fios), they could offer more bandwidth, ie no data caps! They are just trying to push people to watch programming on their expensive regular cable. Its content control now.
Well, not defending TWC, but that is not exactly the way TV works. All TV channels are broadcast all the time to your house. They just charge you more to unlock more of them. So its not like anyone is using more bandwidth to watch 5 channels at once instead of 1 since all of the channels are being fed in the pipe. (However, I do think On-Demand might be actually streamed on-demand, not sure though).
However, it is a good point that if they care so much about the casual user, they don't offer some cheaper "pick your own channels" tv or something.
I don't claim to know how the magic that makes my TV work actually works, but are you saying that there is the same amount of bandwidth used between TW's local distribution point and my house whether I have the TV off or I am watching a 2-hour HD movie (at about 3GB, I'd guess)? The water in my pipes is waiting just outside my faucet in the pipes, waiting for me to turn it on. But is my episode of Biggest Loser just sitting in the lines, along with 1500 other shows, just waiting to get in, and they've sent it hoping I'll watch? Methinks not, but meknows not...
Think you need to keep TV separate from Pay Per View ON Demand programming. TV is streamed to your house all the time whether you watch it or not, its just whether your set top box decodes it based on your account settings. Hence, when you switch to a show already in progress, you don't start at the beginning. Movies on Demand is very different. That is streaming on demand and requires content servers at their end to queue up the requested content and stream it specifically to you. Kind of like a Netflix over the web rental. Speaking of which, Netflix probably has more to do with TW wanting to impose bandwidth caps than infrastructure issues. As brick and mortar video rental stores all go Chapter 11, TW is now feeling the pinch to their revenue stream from Netflix, iTunes Rentals. If there is any infrastructure issue it is because TW wants to use more of the available bandwidth to deliver Pay Per View services. I.E. nickel and dime you somewhere else while claiming to save you money if you have low internet usage.
Yes, that is correct. Think of it as like radio stations. They are always broadcasting their signal, whether you are listening to it or not. It is the same with Live TV on cable, all channels are always being sent. Your cable box knows what subscription plan you have so it knows to not let you watch channels you aren't paying for (like parental control blocking channels).
Sure the ANALOG channels are all broadcast. But increasingly, especially on Time Warner, the digital channels are becoming switched, meaning that they aren't broadcast unless somebody on your plant is watching them. Which allows them to support more channels and allocate more bandwidth for internet etc on the same plant.
So to some extent the analogy is still valid. To some extent.
Well actually the way TW(in Rochester and Austin especially) are going for TV delivery, the analogy applies better and better. Pretty much all the channels added over the last couple of years(including most of the HD channels) are delivered via switched digital video(SDV) where (as best I understand it), a number of channel frequencies(and keep in mind that cable modem and digital cable frequencies overlap) are set aside and the settop boxes on a given cable segment(probably neighborhood) actually request what channel they want to see, and it gets assigned to one of the available frequencies(if available...I've had times when it told me that I had to try again later for that channel). So in the SDV model a person with a standard def TV is likely rarely using up one of the SDV channels where a HDTV watcher would be...that seems to fit the analogy.
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Someone made an excellent point on the radio: they market this as a "fairness" tool to ensure people who overuse thier services are not paying to little, while people who use the service very little are not overcharged. Well, I watch 2-3 shows a week on various cable channels, but I pay the same as someone who keeps 5 HDTVs on all the time and consumes massive bandwidth that way. I don't see them putting any caps on TV usage, nor do I see them offering a-la-carte options so I can buy the 5 damn channels that I watch and not pay for 1000 that I don't. I don't even speak the language of 10 of the channels, why do I pay for that? How is that fair? But apparantly, bandwidth for downloads is a limited resource; bandwidth for TV is unlimited to the point of forcing content on people. BS.
PS, I live in Austin, and the minute they roll out caps at TW, AT&T will get a call from me.
Well, the technology is different, and so while the analogy is good, its not perfect.
With regular cable tv, you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth (channels) that are always streamed to your tv's, only watch a certain amount at a time (DirecTV's 8 sports channels at a time mucks things up a bit). If you have the TV on all day, you only consume.......
....screw it, they are both complicated (with OnDemand and multiple tvs and phone and such). You are right. TV takes up way more bandwidth (Comcast is even compressing HD channels even more, they already look like crap). If cable had better infrastructure (like Fios), they could offer more bandwidth, ie no data caps! They are just trying to push people to watch programming on their expensive regular cable. Its content control now.
Well, not defending TWC, but that is not exactly the way TV works. All TV channels are broadcast all the time to your house. They just charge you more to unlock more of them. So its not like anyone is using more bandwidth to watch 5 channels at once instead of 1 since all of the channels are being fed in the pipe. (However, I do think On-Demand might be actually streamed on-demand, not sure though).
However, it is a good point that if they care so much about the casual user, they don't offer some cheaper "pick your own channels" tv or something.
I don't claim to know how the magic that makes my TV work actually works, but are you saying that there is the same amount of bandwidth used between TW's local distribution point and my house whether I have the TV off or I am watching a 2-hour HD movie (at about 3GB, I'd guess)? The water in my pipes is waiting just outside my faucet in the pipes, waiting for me to turn it on. But is my episode of Biggest Loser just sitting in the lines, along with 1500 other shows, just waiting to get in, and they've sent it hoping I'll watch? Methinks not, but meknows not...
Think you need to keep TV separate from Pay Per View ON Demand programming. TV is streamed to your house all the time whether you watch it or not, its just whether your set top box decodes it based on your account settings. Hence, when you switch to a show already in progress, you don't start at the beginning. Movies on Demand is very different. That is streaming on demand and requires content servers at their end to queue up the requested content and stream it specifically to you. Kind of like a Netflix over the web rental. Speaking of which, Netflix probably has more to do with TW wanting to impose bandwidth caps than infrastructure issues. As brick and mortar video rental stores all go Chapter 11, TW is now feeling the pinch to their revenue stream from Netflix, iTunes Rentals. If there is any infrastructure issue it is because TW wants to use more of the available bandwidth to deliver Pay Per View services. I.E. nickel and dime you somewhere else while claiming to save you money if you have low internet usage.
@JoeNES
Yes, that is correct. Think of it as like radio stations. They are always broadcasting their signal, whether you are listening to it or not. It is the same with Live TV on cable, all channels are always being sent. Your cable box knows what subscription plan you have so it knows to not let you watch channels you aren't paying for (like parental control blocking channels).
Well, its actually not that simple.
Sure the ANALOG channels are all broadcast. But increasingly, especially on Time Warner, the digital channels are becoming switched, meaning that they aren't broadcast unless somebody on your plant is watching them. Which allows them to support more channels and allocate more bandwidth for internet etc on the same plant.
So to some extent the analogy is still valid. To some extent.
Well actually the way TW(in Rochester and Austin especially) are going for TV delivery, the analogy applies better and better. Pretty much all the channels added over the last couple of years(including most of the HD channels) are delivered via switched digital video(SDV) where (as best I understand it), a number of channel frequencies(and keep in mind that cable modem and digital cable frequencies overlap) are set aside and the settop boxes on a given cable segment(probably neighborhood) actually request what channel they want to see, and it gets assigned to one of the available frequencies(if available...I've had times when it told me that I had to try again later for that channel). So in the SDV model a person with a standard def TV is likely rarely using up one of the SDV channels where a HDTV watcher would be...that seems to fit the analogy.