HTNut

If you're a fan of hulu.com or any other free streaming internet TV website, you'll be happy to know that two internet service providers (Comcast and Time Warner) are working on measures that will prevent their customers from using these free services.

California Chronicle reports,

How are they going to do it?

Which means that these shows will not be made available on hulu.com or other free streaming sites right away like you used to. Why? Here's what one of Time Warner's executives was quoted, "It's a windowed approach to reward paying customers and to provide the advertisers with an opportunity to have their commercials viewed across multiple platforms,".

Is 2009 going to be considered the birth of free TV or is this just the end?

I'm only attaching part of this great article. You can read more about it here.

Mockingbird

No, I don't see how cable providers can get into the business of show producers that choose to allow their programming to appear someplace else. If cable providers rock the boat to much top shows will simply go on the net like Ghost Whispers did awhile back. Shows still popular right?

I call it the birth of Internet TV and the aging of the cable networks. Greed has gotten to Cable channels, they brought this on themselves through excessive commercials and rising costs. Thats why they are becoming internet providers, they see the writing on the wall

Aaron62

This is one of those circumstances where I like, try to look at this as a business because, how can streaming TV websites possibly be legal in the first place. It's not very fair when someone like Hulu.com can take a show that's been broadcasted over an OTA or cable network (who have spent money with filming, salaries, and all the other thousands of expenses) and put it on the internet, and make money off of it. I like free TV just as much as the next guy, but TV stations have every right to try and claim expenses back by streaming their own videos on the internet.

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.

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.

Aaron62

Noted, great info.

Piggie

But what erks me is any cable internet add brags about their bandwidth, then in the fine print tell you that you can't really use it.
The advertise being able to watch streaming video, but punish their subscribers if they actually use it.

This may be in the business interests of cable companies just as no credit laws are in favor of Loan Sharks.

bicker

No: Their initial instinct was to tell you could really use it, and pay for what you use. Then their instinct was to still tell you that you could really use it, and pay for what you use over a certain amount. See above for an explanation why neither of these first two approaches that cable has tried to employ are working out.

Blame rests squarely on the shoulders of heavy users who use the media to impose their perspective above yours (assuming you're not one of "them" ).

Paying more for more usage, if they were left in peace to do so, would not be "punishment". That's simply fairly pricing services based on value provided.