Originally Posted by Jay

Aaron, have you ever seen the wiki for Hulu.com? Ownership of hulu.com is a venture between a few major networks,



I think this has more to do with Comcast and Time Warner getting a piece of the pie, and at the same time, negating the costs of providing broadband services for streaming video watchers.

Originally Posted by bicker

This really is a matter of fairness. Streaming video, especially streaming HD video, is invariably going to represent a very substantial additional load on ISP resources, while at the same time representing a very substantial increase in the value delivered to a specific subset of ISP customers. So either way you look at it (either based on the additional costs that servicing that usage incurs, or based on the additional value that servicing that usage delivers), there is such a sound foundation for monetizing that usage. Already, we've seen forces that foster heavy users (to the detriment of light users) squash efforts to do so via metering usage, and we see these same forces working to undermine doing so via usage caps and overage charges. Essentially these forces seek to obstruct any efforts to reflect the substantially heavier load heavy users put on service resources, and the substantially greater value heavy users get from their usage, in the prices paid by heavy users versus the prices paid by light users. They essentially want to keep the current pay-one-price system where, effectively, light users subsidize heavy use.

Given how these forces have arrayed themselves to obstruct the two most rational means of fairly reflecting these differences in resource load and in value delivered, they are essentially, though perhaps inadvertently, driving pursuit of the less neat-and-clean measures.