Around the Net
Netflix Calls Out Comcast (Again)
- CNET, Tuesday, April 24, 2012 11:31 AM
In other Netflix news, CEO Reed Hastings is once again suggesting that Comcast is competing unfairly in the streaming-video sector. "Comcast caps its residential broadband customers at 250 gigabytes per month," Hastings explained in a letter to investors, this week. "On the Xbox the Netflix app, the Hulu app, and the HBO GO app, are all subject to this cap. But Comcast has decided that its own Xfinity Xbox app is not subject to this 250 gigabyte cap. This is not neutral in any sense."
In other words, Hastings believes Comcast is giving its own Xfinity Web-video service a competitive advantage, explains CNet. Not the first time, however, “Hastings has begun to regularly complain in public about Comcast's decision not to count Xfinity's data against the company's cap,” CNet notes. “Netflix doesn't typically criticize competitors in public, so this is likely a sign that the issue is important to the Web's top video service.”
Recently responding to one of Hastings’ broadsides, Comcast explained that the data caps don't apply to Xfinity because its data travels over its own private IP network, and not over the public Internet. According to Hastings, however: "The Xbox is a pure Internet device with a single IP address, works over a consumer's home Wi-Fi, and data to the Xbox is Internet data," Hastings wrote.
