Last week I wrote about concerns Internet providers might some day change the unfettered access we currently have. You can understand their worry about providing me a workaround to services they’d like me to buy from them, like local telephone and pay-per-view video.
In the past Helaine and I bought Major League Baseball’s web package. It’s delivered by Comcast on my high speed Internet connection and competes with Comcast’s own video-on-demand service. Comcast is the passive carrier and gets nothing from this sale. My gain is Comcast’s loss – literally.
If you read this article from the Washington Post you can hear toes being stuck in the water. Bell South wants this to change. I’m sure they’re not alone.
Of course it makes sense for providers to try and monetize their service. But my selfish concern is me, not them. I want to be able to decide what I want, when I want it, and then get it with all the speed I’ve paid for.
Unless my ISP is currently holding back (and I don’t think it is), the only way to make some services faster is to throttle back the non-favored while allowing the others free access.
This is a very complex issue, as cable and phone companies watch their core businesses get cannabilized by ‘fat pipes’ they themselves provide!
You haven’t heard the last of this. The fact that it’s in the Washington Post as a news and not tech story, written by a staff writer, says it’s already on the mainstream radar.
Blogger’s note: I own a very small amount of Comcast stock as part of my retirement plan.
The rapid success of Major League Baseball’s online services is itself an interesting story. A few years ago, the 30 major league teams agreed to put in a million dollars each over a number of years to get mlb.com up and running and profitable. As it happened, finanacial success came so fast that mlb.com was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in income well before the teams were reached their initial financial commitment. No one realized how successful, and how quickly successful, mlb’s web services would be.