Netflix's Biggest Bingers Get Hit With Higher Internet Costs (latimes.com) 116
An anonymous reader shares a report: James Wright had never worried about staying under his data cap. Then he bought a 4K TV set and started binge-watching Netflix in ultra-high definition. The picture quality was impressive, but it gobbled up so much bandwidth that his internet service provider, Comcast, warned that he had exceeded his monthly data limit and would need to pay more. "The first month I blew through the cap like it was nothing," said Wright, 50, who lives with his wife in Memphis, Tenn. With a 4K TV, he said, "It's not as hard to go through as you'd think." All that bingeing and ultra-HD video can carry a high price tag. As online viewing grows, more subscribers are having to pay up for faster speeds. Even then, they can run into data limits and overage fees. Some opt for an unlimited plan that can double the average $52-a-month internet bill.
Wright is what the cable industry calls a power user -- someone who chews through 1 terabyte of data or more each month. Though still rare, the number of power users has doubled in the past year as more families stream TV shows, movies and video games online. They should continue to grow as new video services from Disney, AT&T, Apple and NBCUniversal arrive in coming months. In the first quarter of this year, about 4% of internet subscribers consumed at least 1 terabyte of data -- the limit imposed by companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Cox. That's up from 2% a year ago, according to OpenVault, which tracks internet data usage among cable subscribers in the United States and Europe. "The percentage of subscribers exceeding this level will continue to grow rapidly," OpenVault founder Mark Trudeau said.
Wright is what the cable industry calls a power user -- someone who chews through 1 terabyte of data or more each month. Though still rare, the number of power users has doubled in the past year as more families stream TV shows, movies and video games online. They should continue to grow as new video services from Disney, AT&T, Apple and NBCUniversal arrive in coming months. In the first quarter of this year, about 4% of internet subscribers consumed at least 1 terabyte of data -- the limit imposed by companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Cox. That's up from 2% a year ago, according to OpenVault, which tracks internet data usage among cable subscribers in the United States and Europe. "The percentage of subscribers exceeding this level will continue to grow rapidly," OpenVault founder Mark Trudeau said.
Netflix "Bingers"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is that really how it is spelled?
Yes, it is. [merriam-webster.com]
Verb
binger \ bin-jr \ noun
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I thought 'bing' too. I was trying to figure out why Netflix subscribers would use Bing to search for shows to watch. But we are both wrong.
Bingeing used to be unhealthy overeating. Now it's just spoiling a TV series by watching the whole thing at once. I remember when you had to watch one episode per week, and you could even accidentally miss an episode.
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They don't like it because they want to get that first run on free to air with forced crapvertisments. People instead prefer to watch a full season, you get a real feel for the story and characters (if they write properly and all the episodes work well together).
Netflix bandwidth not a problem in Australia, the NBN so shite, no matter the amount of bandwidth they claim to sell you (all a blatant lie), the tranmission will be so broken and stuttery nothing but standard definition works and even then the res
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Or you could use an Aussie ISP that doesn't oversubscribe their network, like I do.
On fixed wireless. Streaming 4K to my 4K tv via Win10 HTPC (not this pc).
But, since I'm in the west, and you are 90% likely to not be, it's tough to be you :(
But shop around, decent ISPs exist in most places that deliver what you pay for.
Probably.
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Seems to be a quirk of English that the trailing 'e' gets dropped but the pronunciation stays the same.
Bingers are staring at the TV.
Data caps are a ripoff (Score:5, Insightful)
Bandwidth is the only legitimate charge.
But, nobody's stopping them, so, what the hell, have a coke
Re:Data caps are a ripoff (Score:5, Interesting)
But that is ok, I mean we warned the masses this would come what, 10 years ago ? Now as 8K sets are making the market, this is only going to get worse. Data caps need to go , and sane bandwidth limits need to be the norm.
I sit here in Colombia on 10 gig fiber and pay about 93$ us. I have no bandwidth excess charges, I can stream till my hearts content, and the isp doesn't say a word, as long as I pay my bill. Multiple 4k streams don't even slow us down. Why isn't every isp like this ? Provide a pipe, and if you can't provide the bandwidth cut back service until you can, don't give us an arbitrary data number that you feel makes you most profitable.
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Maybe users can just cut back? I mean, 8K TV, that just sounds stupid from the the start if you're using that for something other than high rez display of text on a very large screen, but definitely not for home use except as a tool to brag to your friends.
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Finding 8k content is likely to be a problem for some years to come.
Being able to stream 8K content is likely to be an issue for even longer, I'd expect.
The demand will be very low, the ability to supply (let alone film/upscale) will not be high for quite a while.
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Or like where I live, have competition that isn't DSL or Cable. (Having two cable providers in my city makes caps non-existent.) I've said before (perhaps even on this site) that competition is the key to preventing the draconian measures government-sanctioned monopolies enact when "there's nowhere else to go."
It's sad that there aren't more multiple-provider cities...
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I've said before (perhaps even on this site) that competition is the key to preventing the draconian measures government-sanctioned monopolies enact when "there's nowhere else to go."
It's sad that there aren't more multiple-provider cities...
I volunteered on a town cable committee once. Sat through one contract negotiation with Comcast. What I learned was that most the contract was boilerplate given to us by Comcast. We had no negotiating power. This was told to us both by Comcast and citizens that said "screw with our cable TV and we will cut you".
There was also a term in the contract that said that we couldn't invite another cable company for competition and if another company set up shop in town, that we would have to make up for any reve
Re:Data caps are a ripoff (Score:5, Insightful)
The affordability of Internet service is dependent upon the effects of statistical multiplexing, taking advantage of the fact that bandwidth demands are bursty to give subscribers the illusion there's a lot more network capacity than there is.
Of course when you leave your ultra high definition smart TV streaming for hours on end, *your* demand is no longer bursty. If enough people do that the provider has to add more network capacity.
Fine, you say, they should do that, but you have to expect the provider will pass the cost of that on to you. So your choices look like this:
1) Cheaper service with data caps.
2) More expensive service with no cap
3) Cheaper service without data caps but with inconsistent streaming performance.
None of these scenarios is inherently more legitimate than any other. They just meet different needs.
Re:Data caps are a ripoff (Score:4, Insightful)
I contest that #2 is inherently more legitimate than the other two if you assume a scenario where the ISP is not able to lie about their actual capacity - which, incidentally would quickly become the case if all bandwidth allocations were thusly known to be static and not billed by usage.
Re:Data caps are a ripoff (Score:4, Insightful)
Running a 3 Mbps connection full throttle for 30 days would transfer about 1 TB. So would "3 Mbps burstable to 75 Mbps" be more honest?
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You seem to be implying that the first sentence completely provides the necessary context to answer the question in the second sentence, but I don't see how. Is this a failed attempt at a trick question?
It disguises the contention ratio (Score:5, Informative)
No trick question was intended. I'll try to provide as much context as I can here.
Conventions differ between the terminology commonly used to express network speeds over the last mile to a residence or small business and that used to express longer-haul Internet transit speeds. Both attempt to express a bandwidth allocation model based on queueing theory [wikipedia.org] that not all subscribers will sending bursty traffic at once. In last mile, the promoted rate is the burst rate in megabits per second, but the fine print lists a sustained rate in gigabytes per month. In long haul, the burstable billing [wikipedia.org] convention lists the sustained rate and the burst rate up front, both in megabits per second. (The conversion factor is 1 Mbps = 324 GB/mo.)
Xfinity Internet, the home ISP operated by Comcast, limits each subscriber on most plans to 1 TB per month. This is equivalent to sustaining about 3 Mbps over an entire month. Its ad campaigns mention the burst rates, such as 75 Mbps for Xfinity's Blast plan, but do not conspicuously mention the sustained rate. More technical people tend to complain about advertising that makes the sustained rate inconspicuous or uses different units because it disguises the plan's implied contention ratio [wikipedia.org] (in this case 25:1).
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Ah, in that case the answer is "yes."
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In fact it's really the only honest and ethical way to divide the bandwidth that I see.
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That makes a lot of sense and I'd mod it up if I hadn't already posted a few times on this thread.
Oops, just checked, mod points finished yesterday. Whatevs.
I don't LIKE the idea that the ISP doesn't have enough bandwidth for every customer to run at full speed downloading, but it makes a lot of sense that it's not generally practical to do that in the real world.
I hope that more people who want hi speed internet are able to affordably get it in the near future.
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Yes, but that would require fraud laws to be actually enforced.
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You forgot to mention that US consumer internet prices are among the highest in the world. There's countries where the 4G data is cheaper than US landline-based data. It seems to boil down to a lack of competition.
And while internet in EU cannot be described as cheap, it's cheaper than over the pool and data caps are virtually non-existent as the subscription is speed-based. With minimal price differences between cheapest and middle tiers. Data is dirt cheap anyways. Your providers are complaining about pro
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My ISP offers exactly your choices, last time I looked (and I found that I had been moved to a no cap service! And at no extra charge).
Even the unlimited but variable speed service has a minimum speed that is more than required to deliver HD content.
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if internet is a public utility like electricity then you pay more if you use more
just like bandwidth caps or the water company selling you a set amount of water per month and charging more for more usage
It's not as hard to go through as you'd think (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the point of a 2MB/s connection if you can't pull it down 24/7, or at least 8/7.
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with bursts to 50GB if a new game comes out.
Only? They should play some AAA titles instead of indie games.
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Because surfing the web, downloading software, etc. are "bursty" - it's a far better experience if the requests can be serviced quickly. Also, latency-sensitive applications perform better if the serialisation overhead is lower. The same size packet takes less time to get on the wire with a higher line speed. Gaming will perform better with higher line speeds even if you're not using anything like the full bandwidth.
Power User? (Score:5, Insightful)
Get an UNLIMITED plan (Score:5, Funny)
Featuring:
* unlimited throttling
* unlimited data caps
* unlimited unexpected service interruptions
* unlimited limitations placed upon how you use the intarweb tubes
Sign up today!
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Cutting the cord - more expensive by the day (Score:2)
Still do not think it could be more (Score:1)
I've been saying for at least two years that soon it's going to be more expensive to get all your TV via streaming services than it would be to get it all through cable/satellite
I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon prime, let's say $40 a month to include some other stuff that I occasionally buy or subscribe to.
If I want to get TV services instead of just internet it jacks my cable bill up way more than $40, and adds extra monthly fees for the boxes to watch content on. Even if I did pay overages on my cable i
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Hey, tell us about how you don't even own a TV to plug that DVR into?
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I disagree, the hardware and bandwidth are getting cheaper by the day. The performance of routers, switches, and modems is going up all the time thanks to Moore's law. I started this decade with a 15megabit connection, which was promptly upgraded to something like 45 for the same price. Now I have something like 300 or 400 (who cares anyways) and I couldn't talk the internet provider to connect me to a cheaper slower line because they said _this_ is the slowest service on offer.
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vegan, non-drinker, kombucha..
You can't pick all 3 of these oh wise AC!
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really, I'll bet he's a vegan too and doesn't watch barbaric sports or drinks alcohol and makes the best kombucha and goes on about how ruby is the one true programming language
Wrong on all accounts. You can't even troll properly. AC's are the worst, Jerry, the worst.
couch potatoes are power users? (Score:5, Insightful)
so many other things to do except watch TV for hours every day
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so many other things to do except watch TV for hours every day
Their skill set is pretty much limited to staring at the screen and dribbling Cheeto crumbs. What else do you expect the trolls who used to post anonymously on slashdot to do? Netflix gonna feed the trolls.
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Perhaps the comment should have been "so many other things to do except watch *4K* TV for hours every day".
An alternative would be to watch HD or Full HD TV but not UHD TV due to the current limitations.
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3 hours per day is nothing out of the ordinary for a multi person household and leaves plenty of time for you to do your many other things. Also you're assuming that 100% of the person's 1TB goes towards his TV. At some point he'll be installing windows updates too.
"binge" (stigma)? Power User? Or just current? (Score:2)
We've seen it before in meatspace (Score:2)
Unpriced data is a tragedy of the commons in that everyone acting independently according to their own self-interest depletes the neighborhood's common data pipe.
What's the best way to solve a tragedy of the commons? If it involves money, who should pay for it and how much?
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In this case, the ISP should pay. They should pay out the nose, and they should pay retroactively for all their crimes.
HD snobs (Score:4, Insightful)
I know a few people who have all the latest and greatest tech gadgets, who refuse to watch anything that is not 4K.
When 1080p HD first came out, they also stopped watched anything in SD.
While there is some content where the fine details are important, the majority of TV/Netflix/entertainment content does not fall into that category.
My opinion has always been that if it is worth watching in HD, it is worth watching in SD.
If it is crap in SD, it is crap in HD as well.
To me it looks like these people just spend more money so that they don't feel like they wasted money on their shiny expensive 4K TV.
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I have never understood the obsession with resolution.
Back in the late '60s my dad took us to see 2001 at the Cooper theater in Denver. 3-strip Cinerama. Nobody had ever seen anything like it but needless to say it the huge high(er) res image was big news.
That being a half century ago it is clear that this is nothing new.
Go to your 27-inch 2560 x 1440 computer monitor which are common today. Bring up a video at 1:1 Zoom that is at SD and put it next to one that is at HD also at 1:1. Then tell us that it makes no difference [wikimedia.org]. It is all just a fa
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He didn't say it didn't make a difference, only that the obsession with it makes no sense. He goes on to point out people who flat out REFUSE to watch anything but the highest possible resolution.
Apply that logic to food. Unless you can have perfectly grilled steak and caviar every single day you'll refuse to eat at all. It's stupid.
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Apply that logic to food. Unless you can have perfectly grilled steak and caviar every single day you'll refuse to eat at all. It's stupid.
I wish they'd try!
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Now try doing the same with a 720p and a 1080p video. You might see a difference, if you look really hard.
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Now try doing the same with a 720p and a 1080p video. You might see a difference, if you look really hard.
Absolutely! The law of diminishing returns bites harder as the resolutions increase. I'm still at 1080p although most terrestrial sources top out at 720p.
I can't imagine that there will be a massive leap from 4K to 8K even if the source material was available. Perhaps we should all agree that 4K is enough unless you want a 200" screen but that's a different issue..
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I can see the difference, if I'm actually looking for it, on a scene with detail, and on a still image. But under normal viewing conditions, while actually focused on the program? I couldn't tell them apart.
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When my 15 year old 1080p tv finally crapped out I replaced it with an "expensive" $500 LG TV which was a third of what I paid for my 1080p tv. So perhaps you are a bit off base there. I can get a 4K for as low as 300 from Best Buy.
You also only seem to value TV for its dialogue at which point why not just listen to the radio? Frankly I'm okay seeing Gal Gadot in 4k or freakin Planet Earth. Many shows are far more immersive in 4k. You also get better sound. There are a great many shows out there where you
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Well, a 1080P stream needs 5.5Mpb on Netflix and 8Mbps on Amazon. a 4K stream needs about 20Mpbs. a 720P stream needs about 3.5Mbps.
Problem is - you don't see in 4K. On a 65" TV, in order to be able to see 4K as any better than 1080 you need to sit less than 8 ft from the TV and sit about 4ft from the TV to resolve each pixel. Nobody sits that close to that large a TV. So no, 4K is a gimmick that you don't actually see.
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Ding ding ding!
I laugh when I see a setup where the TV is 15 feet or more away. Might as well put your cell phone on a selfie stick, it will be better.
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If I explained it, you still wouldn't understand. My tv is old and just barely 1080, but I get why others do it. You should ask those people you know to spend some time filling you in.
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Because once you have the option it's absolutely terrible to go back. I will guess that the SD/HD was probably more about the annoying bars/bad lack of upscaling in the early days of HD. Sometimes I have to check to tell whether its 4K or HD depending on the content - agreed that for some things it makes very little difference, but I'm still really looking forward to 4K sports.
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>"I know a few people who have all the latest and greatest tech gadgets, who refuse to watch anything that is not 4K."
ALMOST NOBODY can tell ANY difference on a reasonably large (60-80" TV) 4K upscaling TV at normal viewing distances (typically 10 feet) between otherwise identical 4K source material and 1080P source material (being automatically upscaled). How do I know? Because I have eyes. And I have actually tested people with this scenario. Can some people see a difference when standing 1 foot in
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The source I was using was excellent, native (shot in 4K), high-bandwidth 4K source material. So it wasn't something that was 1080P and upscaled to 4K or poor quality 4K. I wasn't using Netflix. These were local files, over which I had full control.
I stand by my claims my original posting. I estimated that almost nobody (and by that I mean something like way under 1%) would ever notice a difference in a "real word" situation.
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Similarly, many 4K things on Netflix are just upscales of 1080, meaning you're just comparing your TV's upscaled to Netflix's upscaler. They took so much flak for that they forced all Netflix originals to be filmed on 4K capable cameras from that point on.
There's a ton of Youtube content that does the same -- upscaling SD to HD, or HD to 4K.
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I have never understood the obsession with resolution.
I've never understood people who like quality in all forms either. I mean if a 500kb GIF porn was good enough for me it should be good enough for anyone. The only thing that matters is the size of the jubblies.
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Perfect commercials (Score:1)
Netflix co-location? (Score:3)
Didn't Netlfix agree to do some co-location with major ISP's so that they had servers on Comcast's network and streaming from them wouldn't be counted against a persons data cap? Also as of 2014 I thought Netflix had some kind of deal with Comcast to keep this from happening http://www.dourish.com/classes... [dourish.com]?
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Doing business directly with Comcast is like making handshake bargains with Darth Vader; eventually you just start praying they don't alter the deal any further.
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No, Netflix bullied ISPs into hosting their gear and paying their power bills so Netflix could avoid paying for fair peering agreements.
Netflix set up a speed test website to name and shame any ISP who didn't capitulate, falsely telling users that their ISP was preventing them from receiving Netflix's best quality streams (even if they actual speed a user got was well in excess of Netflix's recommendation). Netflix then provided helpful links for people to complain about the result to their ISPs.
Netflix wa
Headline is innacurate (Score:2)
Should read
"Comcast Sucks"
The worst part is that Comcast is probably getting paid 3 times
1) Monthly billl
2) Payment from Netflix for using their network
3) Data Cap charge
Next, they will probably work out some way to inject ads into streaming services
There are other ISP's that don't have data caps. If you move, make sure to check who provides access to that area.
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you left off #4:
Where they petition for government handouts to upgrade their infrastructure; or expansion of rural broadband.
or #5:
By actively blocking municipal broadband initiatives they're able to maintain artificially high monopoly prices.
Same problem (Score:5, Interesting)
We had the exact same problem. I picked up a 4k TV at a good price, which has Roku built in. Kids would watch YouTube or Netflix on it and the data usage was sky high. We used 99% of our 1 TB cap last month.
Unfortunately, and crazily enough, Neither Roku, nor apps like YouTube or Netflix allow you to set quality or bandwidth limits. Yes, there is a hidden Roku menu where you can set some quality limits, but it is well documented on the internet that this does exactly nothing.
I thought our higher-end router would allow me to throttle connections per-device, or perhaps set per-device caps, but it does not. We've basically kicked the kids off the 4K TV for now, limited them to phones and tablets for watching, until I can come up with a better router (or a 3rd party firmware) that will let me set a bandwidth cap per-device. Then I can play around with some throttles, maybe starting around 5 Mbps, to see how that affects quality versus data use.
To sum up, it's ridiculous that these devices do not let you specify quality or bandwidth limits. That seems like the most basic functionality in this day and age.
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Get a mikrotik for $20 and set that bandcap per device
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Neither Roku, nor apps like YouTube or Netflix allow you to set quality or bandwidth limits.
Netflix used to let you choose quality on the site, does it still do that?
Anyone remember the good ole' days... (Score:2)
...when cable companies said there was no way they could charge us only for the channels we want to watch?
Because now they're saying there's no way they can charge us the same amount for the bandwidth to watch just those channels.
Can't until the day televisions have credit card readers for those of us who insist on buying things carte blanche.
Some quick calculations (Score:2)
So, you'd need to average ~4 hours 6 minutes of 4k content per day to hit your cap:
1,000,000 megabytes cap / 2.25 MBps / 60 seconds / 60 minutes / 30 day = 4.11 hours / day
Certainly not what I would call easy but doable with multiple people in the household. However, not all the content is 4k so you're probably looking at closer to 6-8 hours / day.
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I just checked, the cap is actually 1024GB I guess for once someone didn't round down what a GB/TB actually was, like the disk drive makers do.
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So an hour a day per user in a family of 4. Families are the market for internet and streaming services. Great job slitting their own wrists. The sad part is when those families leave, everyone else gets to make up the cost. Hemorrhaging customers is not linear.
Bigger data user pays more. Film at 11. (Score:2)
Really? People using more data pay more for internet? Wow. How can that possibly be fair at all?
Sure, we can argue until the heat death of the universe about what constitutes "fair" data limits and usage patterns, and about whether this ISP or that one is "good" or "sucks", but when you come right down to it, heavier users paying more than lighter users is not fundamentally unfair or unreasonable, even if that heavier usage happens to be due to "cord cutting" or streaming services or whatever.
Not a problem (Score:1)
Try to buy business class internet (Score:2)
Also, stop voting for the kinds of people who let companies get away with this crap. Muni-broadband for the win. In 2019 Internet should be universal. There's just too much value in everyone having it.
Just offer two tiers of connection (Score:2)
I've never had a cap problem in the US (Score:2)
Another Truism Report (Score:2)
"Those who use the most bandwidth tend to get charged for using a lot of bandwidth." -- News at 11.
Re:Leechers (Score:5, Interesting)
No... most of us do not and have never referred to people using a service they pay for as leeches.
You've drunk too much of the cable industry's Kool-Aid.
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Fat.
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Dildad.
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What do you call a moron who doesn't know what "shill" means? fenrif.
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It depends (Score:2, Insightful)
No... most of us do not and have never referred to people using a service they pay for as leeches.
Sure we have, in a world of realistically limited bandwidth in the past, anyone who has use far more than the normal share of network or other resources was considered a leech. Mostly in the past these were guys running large numbers of torrents, or other kinds of file sharing. Because of how cable internet has worked it kind of sucked if you were on the same local network as them and impacted your own servic
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The cable companies have figured out: (artificial) scarcity leads to higher prices. They don't have any issues with people upgrading their streaming services.
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Why would I be a leech for downloading a season of a TV show but not a leech for streaming a season of a TV show?
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How do feel about the electric company's usage of "power user"?
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I imagine that you have no sense of humor at all.
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"Leeches" used to be the term used to describe people who only download from a service that relies on both user downloads and user uploads. IE, a peer to peer file share that wouldn't work if people didn't offer for upload the file they just downloaded.
Someone using an "excessive amount" of bandwidth to the detriment of others was a "bandwidth hog." Even still, that was more often used for shared home connections, like if you had 5 people on a wifi network and this one guy ran a filesharer that made the who