Speaker: How's that three strikes thing working out, anyway?
107 Responses
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Jackie Clark, in reply to
Sing it sister. I have enormous impatience with the " TV is evil" brigade, I'm afraid. I love it, wouldn't be without it. And I watch most of the crappiest shit on the box, too. Survivor, ANTM.....you name it, I'll probably watch it.
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About ISPs and capacity. First, I think that distinction nzlemming made between the commercial ISP and ISPs as defined in law is important. Second, as nzlemming notes, if you're a commercial ISP, then the more people you can service off a given capacity link the better off you are -- yes, you sell the possibility of using a lot of data, but you also want people to not use what they've paid for, and in all likelihood, you provision for rather less than theoretical maximum and hope that your users don't magically all change behaviour and use their full capacity at once.
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It's interesting that the value of copyright material is $US 80,000 a song
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10268199-93.html
when copyright holders are getting the money but $NZ 75 is too much when they have to fork over the money. -
It's interesting that the value of copyright material is $US 80,000 a song
Ah yes. The Joy of Copyright Maths
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
in all likelihood, you provision for rather less than theoretical maximum and hope that your users don’t magically all change behaviour and use their full capacity at once.
The industry even has words for the concepts: "over-subscription" for selling more capacity than you have, and "contention ratio" for the relationship between how much you've sold and how much you've actually got.
Over-sub is a sound economic behaviour when one considers that almost nobody uses all (or even most) of their connection's maximum capacity all of the time. Most, in fact, use only a small fraction. The reason that it's total bullshit that ISPs want high-volume users since it makes them money is because the high-volume users are the ones who force ISPs to buy additional bandwidth in order to reduce their contention ratios and give "ordinary" users an adequate experience. Money comes from users who don't use their connections much at all, allowing massive over-sub'ing because the contention ratios don't ever get very bad. -
Sacha, in reply to
because of the old-school approach to rights management that dictates NZ is a separate geographical region therefore we must negotiate separate rights with a NZ distributor
amen. it's nuts
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Sacha, in reply to
You poor peasants, in thrall to its horrid glow
guilty
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Sacha, in reply to
you provision for rather less than theoretical maximum
contentious
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nzlemming, in reply to
Fact. That's how the business works. You may not like it but that's how it is. Much like airlines overbooking because they know from experience that some will cancel. Generally, it works out for you.
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Sacha, in reply to
That's how the business works
I know. play on 'contention', sorry
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nzlemming, in reply to
Doh. In my defence, m'lud, it was late.
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There's a story in the Herald today about the first third-notice to be issued.
There's no information about what music this person was downloading, but persisting with the one form of access that will get you into trouble seems stupid.
I suspect it's one of the people permanently seeding hundreds of albums that Rianz et al have known about for some time. I can't muster much sympathy if that's the case.
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I have been using so much data this last year. I once made the 'if you have a plan of 20gig or more you must be downloading illegally' on RNZ and I was quickly shot down, and I do think it was dumb thing for me to say.
My data usage has been soaring since I've been listening to must online a lot. I'm using Rdio, a legit service, and Spotify comes out really soon right? Yay for competition. It really does work well as a concept and it kind of makes the RIANZ war on downloads quite irrelevant.
I'm pretty keen to watch Game of Thrones at this point. I can't believe telstra haven't sorted out iSky to their subscribers.
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Russell Clarke, in reply to
Orcon do the same zero-rating for some Steam content. The trouble is, you're not always guaranteed to be downloading it from a local server.
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nzlemming, in reply to
I watch it on SoHo via TelstraClear and record it on my T-box when it conflicts with something else.
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I'm not giving up TV, but I might give up Sky. Soho is now the only reason I have it, and it's not enough for the cost, considering those series all come out on DVD next season, and that's how I'd prefer to watch them, and there's far too many to keep up with anyway, my Fatso queue has hundreds of hours in there to get through. Just got to convince my wife. And get over the "watch it while it's brand new" thing which I really don't know why I care about, considering I never end up discussing the shows with anyone.
As for downloads, I can see why people do it, but I can't say it appeals to me. I don't enjoy the stuffing around involved. In the time when I used to do it, it felt like I was on permanent IT support for my entertainment system, and a slave to my data, which had to be constantly checked. Some people love doing that, cataloging their stuff carefully, but it wasn't my bag. I'd much rather pop the DVD or BluRay in and bingo, she goes.
It is a golden age for TV drama. But ironically, I find myself struggling to stay awake through it, the sheer volume of stuff to get through is exhausting, and fiction merges with dreams too easily. It took me 4 hours to get through the season premiere of GoT. In the end I had to actually watch it in the morning to make sure I didn't microsleep and lose the plot.
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on a related note, from today's Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/18/online-copyright-war-internet-hit-back
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
For the latest episodes? And is that full cost of basic pay tv + whatever premium channels you need to buy?
Yep. We've since got a bigger package, but at the time we had only basic + HBO. I note that this seems to be a special deal not explicitly offered to the public at large (I got it by ringing our cable monopoly - NZ is *not* the only place in the world that has to deal with monopolies in that regard - and telling them I wanted HBO, and I wanted it in the cheapest way possible, and if they wanted me to get a sixty-dollar-a-month package to qualify for it I wasn't getting cable at all.)
Basic cable is also cheap in our area, $6 a month or so; it's much more expensive in other parts of the country. It is not out of the question that some people would face paying close to $100/month to get HBO, and that *is* ridiculous. I don't object to subscribing to HBO to get the latest episodes of things. I object to paying for other crap I don't watch to get it.
(I also object to the fact that before we subscribed to cable we got the free-to-air channels in HD as well as regular by simply plugging the cable into our digital TV, but now we have an actual subscription the HD channels are blocked because we don't pay an extra $10/month for them. But such are monopoly cable providers.)
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@Paul Brislen: I couldn't possibly comment on whether I may or may not have used it to watch a bit of Newsnight the other week. (Newsnight, FFS, why region controls on that?!)
@Matthew Poole: In them thar olden days of 2001-2, ISPs in the UK used to be fairly open about their contention ratios, as means to attract more customers. Here, the information seems to be top secret. Or is this because the contention ratios have dropped so much (and speeds increased so much) that they're now largely irrelevant to anyone who isn't doing something very bandwidth intensive?
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Here, the information seems to be top secret. Or is this because the contention ratios have dropped so much (and speeds increased so much) that they’re now largely irrelevant to anyone who isn’t doing something very bandwidth intensive?
They’ve always been secret. ISP engineers mutter amongst themselves over beverages, but only in general terms. Juha may have a better understanding of why, but my take is that it’s down to the fundamentally unhealthy nature of our ISP scene, where the historically-largest bandwidth provider also owned the largest retail ISP and the second-largest retail ISP was owned by another major bandwidth provider. In that environment, the biggest players are never going to say what their contention ratios are because it’s an insight into just how thoroughly (particularly in Telecom’s case) the wholesale side is giving the retail side a huge leg-up over the competition.
I don’t think they’ve dropped dramatically, either. International capacity is still quite expensive, and margins are very tight. The less capacity that’s required, the better. A competition over contention ratios would only be good for the very biggest ISPs with the most commercial negotiating power, and I just don’t see them willingly going there.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
@Paul Brislen: I couldn't possibly comment on whether I may or may not have used it to watch a bit of Newsnight the other week. (Newsnight, FFS, why region controls on that?!)
The BBC's affection for region-control in the past couple of years is really, really stupid. You can't even watch programme trailers on its website from outside the UK.
I guess there is some cost in providing access to public service programming -- or, more likely, paying for a CDN to trunk it around the globe -- but there are ways to address that.
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Peter Graham, in reply to
I don't object to subscribing to HBO to get the latest episodes of things. I object to paying for other crap I don't watch to get it.
Would you be happier paying the same price and not getting channels you don't want to watch?
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Andrew E, in reply to
Ah yes, I do remember now. ISPs (or possibly backbone providers) in the UK were bleating about the cost of all the data being provided by the BBC that viewers were sucking down.
Either that or it was a row about paying the license fee when others could get it for free online. Which brings me back to the fact that I'd happily pay the license fee from here to have unlimited access to BBC programming.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Would you be happier paying the same price and not getting channels you don't want to watch?
I'm saying that's what I *had*, the first time around. And that was fine, I'd have paid the equivalent amount per episode if HBO had offered that option.
I would definitely be in favour of cable companies explicitly moving to a pick-your-channels model instead of decreeing what you get in various packages, but that's unlikely to happen anytime soon for a number of reasons, mostly involving the distortionary effect of sports channels.
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Pete, in reply to
As one who destroyed his telly aeons ago I don't pretend to be morally superior - rather I found it difficult to ignore when on and there was this new internet thingy that could give me the news when I wanted without being yelled at by a Briscoes sale or condescended to by a vacuous newsreader.
I'm impressed by those that can treat it like moving wallpaper.I still watch TV, just not on TV.
No ads, when I want.It's going to take a metric fucktonne of convenience for those like me to come back in to the legitimate fold, if ever.
If there's a technological innovation that will rot your brain, it's Facebook, not TV.
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