Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to […]
October 2, 2009
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to […]
September 27, 2009
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of Hong […]
September 23, 2009
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be […]
September 23, 2009
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw […]
September 22, 2009
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s] proposal – to codify and enforce some […]
September 21, 2009
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario […]
September 11, 2009
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment […]
September 7, 2009
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by […]
September 1, 2009
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good Alberta […]
August 31, 2009
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling […]
August 27, 2009
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking […]
Subscribe
The NY Post reports Hulu is on the verge of leaving cord-cutters behind as the video streaming site prepares to switch to a “TV Everywhere” model that requires viewers to prove they subscribe to a pay television provider before they will be able to stream video online.
That’s a real smart move. Its not as if people who have already ditched cable/sat are going to suddenly hop back on the bandwagon and spend 50-100+ bucks a month for the one or two shows they watched on hulu.
Nothing like completely trashing a decent service.
…….pointless, we have caps!!, even the people that still have cable tv has caps!!, why?? why add this on top of the requirments FCC should address the cable companies out right control… this is gettin to be ridiculous they want us to pay 300 or more a month which is bull
I can’t wait until they go after my free video provider – the public library.
So let me get this straight, Hulu is making you prove you pay a cable bill before you can pay them for your Hulu Plus subscription? Or is it just for the standard, non-pay Hulu that they are doing this for? I thought they were getting rid of that anyway?
I guess they don’t want people to see their ads.
Somehow, I see those guys just hopping over to some link aggregation site which collects illegitimate streaming content or moving onto torrents / direct downloads.
Yes, I think this will fuel piracy, whether end users realize they are “stealing” content or just finding what they think is a legitimate way to watch, even though it isn’t.
If Hollywood wants to rake in the money, they should remove the restrictions, either sell an ad-free subscription service or free ad-supported version and let people watch unencumbered. But just like the rest of the entertainment industry, they want to milk it for every penny, and it just drives people to underground ways to access the content to watch on the device of their choosing.
This is it. Now is the time to begin the fight. If you dont rise up with me like we all did for PIPA and SOPA, the window of opportunity for true net neutrality and consumer friendly streaming will forever close if we tolerate this.
This only encourages piracy. Hollywood media execs just don’t get it.
I’m not sure how they expect to make any money by doing this, why is someone going to pay extra or even bother with the ad laden ‘free’ HULU when they already have cable TV and a DVR that doesn’t use up their capped internet.
This is really just a WIN for Netflix more than anything as they’ll get a boost in subscribers, along with Crackle, and likely people going back to illegal streaming sites which already seemed popular given media reports of those popping up with rebroadcasted TV.
I won’t pay for Hulu Plus precisely because of the presence of ads. If I pay a premium price for a service, it better not come with the same advertising load as the free version. I am capable of being “authenticated” as a “legitimate” cable subscriber because I have a triple play package from Time Warner Cable. But I’ll tell you their authentication system is still far from perfect and often cumbersome to remain logged in. I prefer Netflix and spend the majority of my time there vs. either TWC’s TV Everywhere project or Hulu.
Doesn’t matter much to me. I cut the cord a couple of months ago when I couldn’t get the cable deal I wanted (no competition here) and although they said I could get new customer pricing after a month I’m enjoying the savings with my netflix and dsl (which actally streams better because I had drop outs with my cable modem, but not dsl.) I don’t subscribe to Hulu because the ads annoyed me, my LG netcast doesn’t have access to Hulu, and the Ipad app doesn’t have TV out so it wasn’t worth it to me anyway.
Hulu is one of those websites where they could have perhaps really taken off provided they didn’t screw it up within the last year or so. They need to have some guts to stand up to the companies wanting their content only on TV. I stopped using Hulu when they started to increase the time and amount of ads on the site, but only after they started taking away entire archives of previous episodes of shows. Their crappy video player is just a CPU hog these days, has no HD support unless you’re Paid, and now if they wish to… Read more »
Hi. I have an issue with the trickster studio i bought last year. I was having problems with the software, so i did a total restore. After everything was installed correctly, the application started to run.