Fox to erect a "paywall" Aug. 15

[philosofy]

comcast business class is only 10 bucks more than what residential costs. It also comes with no usage caps either.

 

[DToTheJ]

When you hear the word "paywall," the newspaper Newsday and all of their 31 paying subscribers immediately comes to mind.

Incidentally, didn't News Corp. flirt with the idea of building a paywall for its New York Post (which is a rival rag of Newsday in New York)?

 

[azumanga]

Looking at this, it's not actually a "paywall", as no money is changing hands, but rather, giving preferential treatment to cable subscribers instead of those who get Fox via satellite or over-the-air. Just like First Class passengers getting to board an airplane first before everyone else.

That being said, what if you subscribe to cable only for internet and phone, and you get your TV through other means?

 

[Markxxx]

And a torrent systems demands you upload, so you're gonna have to spend some bandwidth in that direction as well. If you download an occasional show you missed it won't make much of a difference, but if you use it as your main source of TV, even a 250gb cap will hurt you if you DL high def.

250 hours of HD content a month isn't enough for you?

That's enough for you to watch all three hours of CBS primetime every day. And your wife to watch all three hours of NBC primetime every day too. With enough left over to do your surfing and contribute a few dozen GB of uploads.

Well DSL is 150gb. It seems like a lot but not when you divide it up on a family that streams everything. This is exactly the point. Instead of using Netflix, you would have to use U-Verse, Cable or FIOS or whatever to avoid streaming everything. So by doing this, they are driving you from having a choice to their pay per view.

I don't know about other but AT&T meters aren't even close. Last week I asked AT&T why I had downloaded nearly 2gb when my computer is off, the power was out in my area for a day. They told me the meter was accurate and the computer had to be on, and "besides, we don't have to provide you with a meter anyway, and it's up to ME to monitor my usage."

Also AT&T's meter runs four days behind. So you have no idea what your usage is for the month till four days later. In July I didn't get my final count till July 6th because of the holiday.

250gb

Also AT&T is four days behind, so you have no way of really knowing what your downloads are.

I recall the same argument being made when AOL was charging by the minute. People were like, "You don't need to be online for more than a few minutes anyway. You should download all the websites and read them offline.

Why did it change? Because AOL had competition. There is little competition in broadband, sometimes none.

The future of video on the Internet is pretty much going to be flat, until we get actual competition for broadband. Does anyone think if I had four or five choices for broadband, there would be caps on the Internet? No in fact the prices would fall, just like with AOL in the "per minute" dial up days.

 

[Sammi Brie]

The problem is that overbuilders would face low name recognition and extremely high startup costs in the form of infrastructure. Especially the latter.