Comcast Could Buy Netflix, Cablevision If Merger Stalls

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Could you imagine what it would be like if Comcast bought Netflix? People shouldn't even joke about something like that! :(

According to BTIG Research, Netflix has no control shareholders and we have to imagine the board would listen to a truly compelling offer from Comcast. Tech is hard and traditional media companies are simply not offering best-in-class apps across an array of devices. With consumers increasingly interested in ad-free streaming, Netflix could provide Comcast with an incredible team and platform to learn from, which could accelerate Comcast’s virtual MVPD efforts. Not to mention, Comcast could further the reach of Netflix domestically by integrating the service into its set-top boxes.
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Comcast could further the reach of Netflix domestically by integrating the service into its set-top boxes.
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These people just don't get it.
 
I'm more worried about them buying Cablevision. Someone needs to tell Comcast to cease and desist.

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My biggest worry about a merger like that would be the risk to the physical disc shipments since Comcast doesn't have that sort of a relationship with their customers ... however, given that the studios (content owners) are in the driver's seat for digital negotiations currently it might be a good thing to see a merger of Netflix with a company with deeper pockets and more industry negotiating power

That said I think a much better merger for Netflix would be with Disney (the most powerful of the media companies currently) ... Time Warner (with the power of HBO and their other properties they could make a powerful digital service) ... or Amazon (combining the two main digital streaming companies together would increase their negotiating power with the industry, as well as strengthening Amazon's position against their primary competitor, Wal-Mart)
 
kbrickley said:
or Amazon (combining the two main digital streaming companies together would increase their negotiating power with the industry, as well as strengthening Amazon's position against their primary competitor, Wal-Mart)
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Of course this could backfire and media companies wouldn't want anything to do with their content being on Netflix Prime Video. The media companies are the cable companies, until that changes there is always a conflict of interest by making their content available on a competing super service.
 
This is just some analyst bantering random bullshit to keep his bullshit job. Comcast is not going to buy Netflix.
 
If Comcast buys Netflix I'm starting my own Netflix, with blackjack and hookers.
 
I pay for netflix with streaming and blu-ray because it gives me pretty much everything I would want to see for a low monthly fee. If they pull this crap I will just go back to torrenting everything.
 
redrage said:
I wonder where they get their bandwidth to provide all that speed to all their customers for only $70 (+ taxes and equipment)
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Well, if cable companies really have a 97% profit margin on the services they are currently providing, if you cut out the fiduciary responsibility to pay shareholder, you can provide a lot more for a lot less.

I would imagine that 3rd party ISP bandwidth is currently also comparatively cheap, considering what the Tier 1's have been doing on the peering side.

If Comcast and Verizon can restrict peering bandwidth in order to squeeze 3rd parties providing services, using their monopoly over their exclusive userbase as a threat, one would imagine the likes of Cogent, XO, and other tier1's without residential internet offerings would be very eager to get such residential users into their network without having to peer with the large cable companies. It reduces the load on the peering sites, and reduces the power Comcast and Verizon wield over them with their userbase monopolies.

This - I imagine - would be especially true since it is unclear if the FCC's net neutrality regulations under Title II actually apply to peering restrictions or only apply to last mile prioritization.

after all, in the squeeze Verizon and Comcast put on Netflix via their peering with Cogent, it was intentionally limited peering that was surreptitiously used, not any last mile prioritization.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041473076 said:
Well, if cable companies really have a 97% profit margin on the services they are currently providing, if you cut out the fiduciary responsibility to pay shareholder, you can provide a lot more for a lot less.

I would imagine that 3rd party ISP bandwidth is currently also comparatively cheap, considering what the Tier 1's have been doing on the peering side.

If Comcast and Verizon can restrict peering bandwidth in order to squeeze 3rd parties providing services, using their monopoly over their exclusive userbase as a threat, one would imagine the likes of Cogent, XO, and other tier1's without residential internet offerings would be very eager to get such residential users into their network without having to peer with the large cable companies. It reduces the load on the peering sites, and reduces the power Comcast and Verizon wield over them with their userbase monopolies.

This - I imagine - would be especially true since it is unclear if the FCC's net neutrality regulations under Title II actually apply to peering restrictions or only apply to last mile prioritization.

after all, in the squeeze Verizon and Comcast put on Netflix via their peering with Cogent, it was intentionally limited peering that was surreptitiously used, not any last mile prioritization.
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Either way, long story short, it is in the interest of Tier 1's without their own residential ISP service to pull in as many residential users as possible in order to fight the control the likes of Comcast and Verizon currently have, and as such, community internet providers can likely get a bidding war going between these companies reducing their bandwidth costs. this probably only gets more and more favorable, the larger the community trying to provide this service gets.
 
redrage said:
I wonder where they get their bandwidth to provide all that speed to all their customers for only $70 (+ taxes and equipment)
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The same place the other broadband providers did, government grants and subsidies provided by taxpayers to lay fiber networks over existing infrastructure; except this corp actually did it.
 
redrage said:
I wonder where they get their bandwidth to provide all that speed to all their customers for only $70 (+ taxes and equipment)
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The current cost of internet is entirely manufactured to begin with.
 
Looks to be ~$8/Mbps from a tier 1 provider in North America but that is kinda guessing from the little i read.
 
redrage said:
Looks to be ~$8/Mbps from a tier 1 provider in North America but that is kinda guessing from the little i read.
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I don't know about the figures, but I am guessing that has everything to do with who you are.

Tier 1's who don't have their own residential service are being hurt by the likes of Comcast and Verizon who have a stranglehold on the userbase.

The tier 1's without their own residential service have lots of business accounts, like - as an example, Netflix, looking to push out content to end users. For these tier 1's all of that traffic has to pass from their network through a peering site, to the networks of the likes of Comcast and Verizon.

This gives Comcast and Verizon a lot of power over the Tier 1's without residential service, and is how they were able to do this:

netflix-40.jpg


A community internet provider may seem like peanuts compared to the overall internet traffic, but every little bit counts, and every user that is connected directly to them, is one user less who creates traffic over the peer to Verizon or Comcast, and thus reduces the risk of extortion.

So, if I were in their position, I would be deeply discounting bandwidth to any company, cooperative or locality looking to connect end users directly to their Tier1 network.

They get to poke Comcast and Verizon in the eyes, they reduce their risk of extortion, they become more attractive to their business accounts (because of the lowered risk of extortion) and quite frankly, because of how they are forced to compensate Comcast and Verizon for peering where the traffic is overwhelmingly in one direction, it may actually not be costing them as much, as every user which is internal, takes load off the peering site, and thus reduces their compensation costs.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041473316 said:
I don't know about the figures, but I am guessing that has everything to do with who you are.

Tier 1's who don't have their own residential service are being hurt by the likes of Comcast and Verizon who have a stranglehold on the userbase.

The tier 1's without their own residential service have lots of business accounts, like - as an example, Netflix, looking to push out content to end users. For these tier 1's all of that traffic has to pass from their network through a peering site, to the networks of the likes of Comcast and Verizon.

This gives Comcast and Verizon a lot of power over the Tier 1's without residential service, and is how they were able to do this:

netflix-40.jpg


A community internet provider may seem like peanuts compared to the overall internet traffic, but every little bit counts, and every user that is connected directly to them, is one user less who creates traffic over the peer to Verizon or Comcast, and thus reduces the risk of extortion.

So, if I were in their position, I would be deeply discounting bandwidth to any company, cooperative or locality looking to connect end users directly to their Tier1 network.

They get to poke Comcast and Verizon in the eyes, they reduce their risk of extortion, they become more attractive to their business accounts (because of the lowered risk of extortion) and quite frankly, because of how they are forced to compensate Comcast and Verizon for peering where the traffic is overwhelmingly in one direction, it may actually not be costing them as much, as every user which is internal, takes load off the peering site, and thus reduces their compensation costs.
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I didn't read the whole thing just skimmed and looked at the chart
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/
 
Basically Comcrap is already doing the streaming thing with Hulu. And what do we get?
A bunch of fucking ads in everything.
If they buy Netflix, expect to see ad content inserted into everything within a year of the buyout.

At which point, I drop Netflix.
 
redrage said:
I didn't read the whole thing just skimmed and looked at the chart
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/
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Ahh,

If you read the details in that link, they used made up numbers ($10 for transit, $0 for peering) just as an example of how things work.

I found this article which is from late 2013 and is predicting 2014 suggesting that rates range from $2 per Mbit to $0.40 per mbit for transit for the huge organizations using tons of bandwidth, which can be lowered further depending on how much peering is used.

Still, At these rates, these gigabit services SHOULD cost a lot more than they do.

I am by no means an expert on this stuff, but I am guessing some of that is because of what I wrote above, the tier1's looking to get residential users internal to their networks, and thus deeply discounting them.

Google can also offer really low rates - presumably - because billing usually isn't based on incoming AND outcoming traffic, but on whichever one is higher of the two. Presumably Google has a lot more outgoing traffic from its services to external end users than the relatively few google fiber users can hope to generate going in the opposite direction, meaning that all the bandwidth they are selling to google fiber customers is essentially free, so all they have to do is cover the cost of laying the residential fiber (which is by no means tiny)

Furthermore, I believe ISP's lower costs to end users by spreading it across many users. Remember, these costs are for metered bandwidth. Some users may be maxing out their torrents at 1 gigabit/s full duplex, 24/7, but for the majority of users we are talking gigabit speeds only in bursts, with actual usage much much lower.

I mean, lets assume your average user sleeps 8 hours a day, works 8 hours a day and spends 3 more hours between getting ready in the morning, commuting and eating dinner, then, that leaves 5 hours remaining to use the internet, if we assume they are on the internet the rest of that time, and how much of that is streaming netflix, casual browsing or gaming, neither of which tend to max out connections.

So, the ISP's can offer these services at so much lower a cost than the transit price per Mbit/s simply because - on average - most users are not pinning their connections 24/7.

I fully expect someone with more knowledge in this area to jump in and tell me where I've gotten this wrong though.
 
And I for one welcome my new Comflix overlord. No i don't welcome that, that was a joke (jesus, lighten up).

Well if Netflix really does go Comflix then we still have Amazon Prime video, yes? Plus wasn't this the last season of House of Cards. God help me but I cannot find anything worth watching on Netflix these days as it is.
 
Comcast just wants to buy the agreements that Netflix made with their content distributors. Pretty soon, there will only be one source for certain movies, etc. ... and it will be Comcast.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041473383 said:
Ahh,

If you read the details in that link, they used made up numbers ($10 for transit, $0 for peering) just as an example of how things work.
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D'oh Missed that part..

Thanks!
 
I don't see how Comcast buying Netflix would be a big deal at all, but whatever, it's an excuse to get upset about dying non-interactive, passively viewed video that pretty much no one will even care about after the TV generation goes away.
 
redrage said:
I wonder where they get their bandwidth to provide all that speed to all their customers for only $70 (+ taxes and equipment)
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Because it's subsidized by the local government there.

This is kind of why the Republican argument that it's capitalism's job to provide that service is flawed. Having that speed has brought in business, and you can assume a lot of them pay a decent amount in taxes. This sounds better than me than their alternative which is to give businesses money to come and then don't tax them so they'll stay.
 
TItle II really changed things.

They should have split Comcast's ISP & TV services. This would have ruined their day more than anything the government will actually do, it would have removed their anti-neutrality motives and kept government entropy and tendancy for monopoly entrenchment out of the situation.
 
Ryokurin said:
Because it's subsidized by the local government there.

This is kind of why the Republican argument that it's capitalism's job to provide that service is flawed. Having that speed has brought in business, and you can assume a lot of them pay a decent amount in taxes. This sounds better than me than their alternative which is to give businesses money to come and then don't tax them so they'll stay.
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Subsidizing something does not reduce the cost. Cost is same, who pays for it changes.

My guess they probably just got breaks on the install and probably a favorable contract through their Tier 1 provider. Probably even better if they go as a non-profit.
 
Ryokurin said:
Because it's subsidized by the local government there.

This is kind of why the Republican argument that it's capitalism's job to provide that service is flawed. Having that speed has brought in business, and you can assume a lot of them pay a decent amount in taxes. This sounds better than me than their alternative which is to give businesses money to come and then don't tax them so they'll stay.
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From what I recall (though I could be wrong), local government hasn't subsidized the bandwidth.

What they HAVE done is provided a substantial amount of the starting capital to build out the fiber network in the community (which is not insignificant), but once that infrastructure is built, this is supposedly supposed to be self sufficient.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041473316 said:
This gives Comcast and Verizon a lot of power over the Tier 1's without residential service, and is how they were able to do this:

netflix-40.jpg
Click to expand...

The problem with this chart is. The point were Netflix traffic starting seeing problems happens to be the day when they opened HD streaming to all users rather than just users in specific ISP's that had agreements in place. Netflix started cramming more down the pipe during this time.

http://blog.netflix.com/2013/09/highest-quality-hd-now-available-to-all.html?m=1

I'm amazed how the blind hatred of Comcast leads to people turning a blind eye to the actual events. In the end this is simply a contest between multi billion dollar Content Providers (Google, Netflix and the like) vs multi-billion dollar ISP's on who has to pay for the infrastructure.

My opinion has been that no matter who pays, the cost is going to be passed on to the consumer. That said, I would much rather have the people using all the bandwidth pay for it rather than everyone else footing the bill. In the non-internet world, infrastructure also plays by those rules. If a new mall/shopping center opens, very often they need to pay for the increase of traffic flow if it's required.
 
jpm100 said:
TItle II really changed things.

They should have split Comcast's ISP & TV services. This would have ruined their day more than anything the government will actually do, it would have removed their anti-neutrality motives and kept government entropy and tendancy for monopoly entrenchment out of the situation.
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What do TV services have to do with Net Neutrality?

What you are suggesting moves well beyond Net Neutrality rules.
 
jpm100 said:
TItle II really changed things.

They should have split Comcast's ISP & TV services. This would have ruined their day more than anything the government will actually do, it would have removed their anti-neutrality motives and kept government entropy and tendency for monopoly entrenchment out of the situation.
Click to expand...

Except even under Title II they don't have the legal authority to go for a split between ISP and CableTV provider (even Google provides both services, don't they, and they are competitive in both areas) ... they can potentially regulate them to improve their competition with each other but if they go too far too fast then Congress will pass laws on this and take it out of the FCC's hands
 
griffinhart said:
The problem with this chart is. The point were Netflix traffic starting seeing problems happens to be the day when they opened HD streaming to all users rather than just users in specific ISP's that had agreements in place. Netflix started cramming more down the pipe during this time.

http://blog.netflix.com/2013/09/highest-quality-hd-now-available-to-all.html?m=1

I'm amazed how the blind hatred of Comcast leads to people turning a blind eye to the actual events. In the end this is simply a contest between multi billion dollar Content Providers (Google, Netflix and the like) vs multi-billion dollar ISP's on who has to pay for the infrastructure.

My opinion has been that no matter who pays, the cost is going to be passed on to the consumer. That said, I would much rather have the people using all the bandwidth pay for it rather than everyone else footing the bill. In the non-internet world, infrastructure also plays by those rules. If a new mall/shopping center opens, very often they need to pay for the increase of traffic flow if it's required.
Click to expand...

So, the more bandwidth you use, the more you pay. Guess I would be reading more paperback books then like I used too. Sorry but, these services are not irreplaceable. But, if you want to pay more, I will not stop you.
 
griffinhart said:
The problem with this chart is. The point were Netflix traffic starting seeing problems happens to be the day when they opened HD streaming to all users rather than just users in specific ISP's that had agreements in place. Netflix started cramming more down the pipe during this time.

http://blog.netflix.com/2013/09/highest-quality-hd-now-available-to-all.html?m=1

I'm amazed how the blind hatred of Comcast leads to people turning a blind eye to the actual events. In the end this is simply a contest between multi billion dollar Content Providers (Google, Netflix and the like) vs multi-billion dollar ISP's on who has to pay for the infrastructure.

My opinion has been that no matter who pays, the cost is going to be passed on to the consumer. That said, I would much rather have the people using all the bandwidth pay for it rather than everyone else footing the bill. In the non-internet world, infrastructure also plays by those rules. If a new mall/shopping center opens, very often they need to pay for the increase of traffic flow if it's required.
Click to expand...

Why was only some of the ISP's affected then?
 
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