DirectTV Now is definitely the future of what you would think of cable. I wouldn't be surprised if you see Big Cable jump in and offer similar products soon enough.
The question I guess is who is going to be the sucker who provides the infrastructure to access said content. Because that doesn't make money.
They already do I believe? Well they're still half-assed and have tons of issues but I think most of them have been doing something similar (a lot of them started it when they were doing their fiber rollouts since they basically had to come up with a new way of transmitting that as it won't be going on coax). Granted DirecTV Now is the most ambitious. Not sure what is going to happen to rural users if AT&T decides to ditch satellite service. They better hope there's long range wireless (and that costs and bandwidth caps there don't end up being like those for satellite internet services).
It will be us, just as it has always been.
American ISPs decided that competing with each other was dumb so in a lot of places the big boys just stay out of each others way and reap the rewards of having no real direct competitor
This.
On one hand, yeah, caps suck. On the other hand, you're using more of a product, and being charged more for it.
Try reading a book or going outside instead of streaming netflix 8 hours a day.
A product often touted as "unlimited" and specifically touted for being able to use it in such manners. Hell look at the way they advertise their wireless services, and those have bandwidth caps that would be hit very quickly.
Yeah and stop having families cause that just increases your data usage. Your "get a life" comment is bullshit specifically because it should not matter, and this "yeah well you're part of the 3% that abuses bandwidth" that gets alleged whenever someone goes over the cap, and yet somehow tons of people are managing to be "abusing" their "unlimited" internet connections. Its totally the consumers fault for abusing these poor mega corporations (who outright admit there's no technical reason for the bandwidth caps as it is in no way actually causing problems for them).
And hey, if you are not using much data/bandwidth, then you should be even more pissed as you're getting screwed the most of anyone. Think metered/caps is fine, ok, then let's be realistic about that, but then we'd see that even the abusers aren't costing anywhere close to what they're being charged, and people that don't use it much are being charged probably thousands of percent of what even the economically viable cost of their data usage is. 1TB at $0.05/GB (which is likely around ten times more than what it actually costs, so plenty of margin there) is $50.
Plus, are you really going to trust these companies to not straight up fucking lie?
https://consumerist.com/2016/09/06/...data-they-didnt-use-insists-meter-is-perfect/
This is partially the fault of upstream providers too as they charge per usage (95th percentile is typical I believe). Bandwidth should not be charged based on how much is used, there is no real cost associated to how much of it is used unlike with energy like gas or hydro, there is only an ongoing cost of keeping the equipment at both ends running. Suppose a 100gb fibre card in a transport shelf takes more power than a 10gb card so the cost of a higher bandwidth link is a bit higher, but the cost to the ISP/customer should be fixed based on the size of the pipe and not on the usage. In general bandwidth should also be much cheaper. The provider is getting an ongoing payment for equipment that was paid off years ago.
No, it absolutely is not their fault because they already have deals with regards to that. But the mega-ISPs want to bill everyone involved (the content providers like Netflix, the companies providing the connections, and then their customers), despite them having worked out deals that absolutely are fine financially (none of these ISPs are or were losing any money with their deals with the upstream providers). Its just that these huge ISPs got mad because they want more money and because they're just shitty middlemen they weren't able to completely hold all parties hostage. They certainly tried but that blew up in their face (when the FCC reclassified them) because they think people are fucking idiots. They assumed people would get mad at Netflix for the streaming problems and so would be more willing to pony up for their pay TV services; essentially they thought people would be dumb enough to blame their car manufacturer for the traffic on their commute home, and not the assholes shutting down lanes to fuck up traffic so they can then install toll booths despite the roads already having been paid for.
I think in the future the internet will be charged like electricity. Instead of selling you speed tiers, you pay for every byte you use. every home will have fiber to a device that looks like a power meter and you would pay a monthly service fee and then an amount for each byte that passes that meter.
It probably will be and that will be a very scary prospect because they likely will not be subject to the same regulation that electric providers are, and they've shown a willingness to not be even remotely accurate with their metering. Then again, maybe they will have to follow the same regulation, but more because they'll deregulate those others so that they too can get in on this screw job.