Wirelessnorth.ca

Rogers pushes a few buttons to mitigate Netflix threat

In theory, cable TV is a dead media. We have sufficient technology, today, that we can stream any episode of anything ever recorded, anytime, in real time, and in HD to any broadband household. A few decades from now, this whole idea of only being able to watch pre-selected recorded content at certain hours of the day is going to seem awfully strange and quaint. Not to mention the bizarre ritual of millions of subscribers manually making millions of copies of that content on their PVRs when perfectly good original copy already exist on the cloud.

Now in reality, traditional cable/satelite tv isn’t going away anytime soon. The service is reliable, it offers an important easy/lazy level of usability that pc-based alternatives haven’t nearly matched yet. But clearly the writing is on the wall. And services like netflix streaming, and boxee, and youtube, and many others are closing in.

BUT! great news for endangered cable executives everywhere: guess who controls all of the last-mile internet pipes in North America? It’s like having foxes as the sole provider of the chicken pipelines.

Even Michael Hennessy Telus’ top lobbyist has been sounding the alarm that the real net neutrality issue isn’t net neutrality, it’s vertical integration. This concerns, because Telus doesn’t have the same media assets as Bell and Rogers.

When companies with substantial media assets and huge legacy distribution businesses (a.k.a. cable tv) also own the only pipes into your home, it would be crazy not to expect them to use every available lever to favour their own content stack over any others.

And so on the eve of netflix coming to Canada, Rogers cuts their broadband caps (again).

Rogers “extreme” cable option is advertised as 15 Mbps with an 80GB cap at $60/month before taxes and other fees.

For the record, at full theoretical advertised speed, 80GB would earn you 12.9^* hours of usage a month, or just under 30 minutes of usage a day.

^{80GB = 696,320 megabits / 15 megabits per second / 3600 seconds in an hour = 12.9 hrs}

ps. why would this apply to wireless? Well for one it’s all the same players, for another tv and video streaming can be wireless too, and perhaps most importantly all of this logic could apply to separating voice service from wireless pipes as well.