There’s something rotten in the state of online video streaming

> If the government was going to do something, I'd prefer it concentrate on increasing competition.

Indeed, competition would help tremendously. Mandated wholesale access to the last mile delivery would be a great start (and something that used to be mandated for DSL from ILECs). I believe AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc can do a good job of connecting my house to their network, and deliver my data to their office; from there, I'd prefer to have someone else take responsibility.

Bonuses if new regulation in the same spirit covered all mediums (or at least more of them), and addressed unfair pricing practices by AT&T from the last time (direct to consumer offerings were priced significantly below the wholesale pricing, which was anti-competitive). Some parameters for dealing with congestion in the shared medium between the end user and the central office(s) might be appropriate too.

I wish we could amend the constitution that they are not allowed to do anything at all but sell bits to consumers. No selling of content, access to consumers, devices or ice cream or whatever other scheme they come up with. Their sole interest has to be selling more bits! If they even as much as think about doing anything else there need to bd draconian penalties. I would even argue that they are endangering infrastructure and charge them with terrorism.

The first rotten thing there is DRM. There are no DRM-free video services where you can buy anything (Headweb doesn't count because it's regionally restricted). So there simply is nothing to chose from. Failure at step 0. It's not just rotten - it's completely decomposed.

I think if you could do some detection of what connectivity is being used, and other sorts of relevant connection data, it would be a valuable motivator to see, "We've detected you are 30% slower than other customers with x and y differences in service"

This is super hand wavy, but I think with proper data it could be a useful tool.

As a comcast customer, I've noticed that if I am having a problem with streaming video that if I go to speedtest.net, the video streams fine after the initial ping test from speedtest.net. It will be fine for a few moments (seconds to minutes), but will slow down or stutter again eventually. A fresh visit to speedtest.net again corrects the problem. I have a hunch that a visit to speedtest.net will disable traffic shaping for a set period of time in order to convince people that their connection is fine.

It is interesting that in the article about Verizon's shaping of traffic to AWS that the tech support had the author go to speedtest.net and test his traffic in order to tell him "see no problems!". I've had similar responses from AT&T when I was a DSL subscriber.

I understand that traffic shaping should only affect particular sites and that,in theory,there would be no need for a temporary disabling of traffic shaping for a speedtest. My theory is that due to the high volume of packets needed in order to have a good result on speedtest.net, the analyses of packets at the router for traffic shaping is enough of a slowdown to affect the results.

Anyone else ever notice this? Any alternative explanations as to why going to speedtest.net would suddenly make paused streaming video run again? I notice this mainly when watching live streaming youtube events or sometimes when I am watching netflix during peak hours.

I would love to hear alternative hypothesis as to what is going so that they could be tested!