It would be nice if when you hit the pause button it would continue to buffer. THAT would be a nice work around.
shrug
There’s a lot at play here. Does Comcast throttle? Are they allowed to? Does my Netflix movie go from backbone to backbone over several ISPs and get slowed down? Are Netflix’s servers too slow? Do I not know how any of this works because I’m not not in IT nor do I have an engineering background?
The problem is Netflix is promising something they can’t deliver. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. And yet…I continue to pay. I guess that’s the problem. If enough people unsubscribe, something would probably get done.
The public radio show Marketplace had a segment today on just this very thing.
Here’s a quotation from the synopsis:
Tech companies like Google and Facebook don’t just want to dominate the web, they also want to takeover the pipes that bring you the Internet. For example, Google has been laying cables in the oceans around Asia and Facebook has secured fiber cables to move traffic back-and-forth from its data centers.
Right now, access to the Internet is still largely controlled by telecom companies, said Allan Hammond, the director of the Broadband Institute at Santa Clara University. To explain why the tech companies might want a biger part of that pie, Hammond launches into a a fairy tale of the “Three Billy Goats Gruff”…
“There were three billy goats gruff, who wanted to cross the bridge to eat the grass on the other side,” Hammond says.
The first goat tries to cross but the troll living under the bridge, tells him to get off.
“In this case, the troll under the bridge are the telecom companies,” he says.
The bridge is the Internet pipeline that they control. And the goats are tech companies like Google, Netflix and Amazon who need the bridge to deliver their content. In the fairy tale, the goats get rid of the troll. But in real life Hammond says, the tech companies have decided to build their own bridge.