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Netflix has gotten into a dick-measuring contest with the country’s largest Internet Service Providers. The losers of this contest are, of course, Netflix customers.
Netflix and telecom giants like Verizon can’t seem to agree on how much money Netflix should pay for all that extra bandwidth you just used binge-watching House of Cards Season 2.
When Netflix declined to pay additional fees, Verizon decided to take things into their own hands and began limiting their customer’s streaming habits by throttling internet connections.
When the only escape from your 9-to-5 is an evening spent with a Lean Cuisine and half a season of The Office watched back-to-back-to-back, this amounts to a national tragedy. Just ask Jen Zellinger, who according to The Wall Street Journal is barely holding it together:
“The bottleneck has made Netflix unwatchable for Jen Zellinger, an information-technology manager from Carney, Md., who signed up for the service last month. She couldn’t play an episode of Breaking Bad without it stopping, she said, even after her family upgraded their FiOS Internet service to a faster, more expensive package.
‘We tried a couple other shows, and it didn’t seem to make any difference,’ she said. Mrs. Zellinger said she plans to drop her Netflix service soon if the picture doesn’t improve, though she will likely hold on to her upgraded FiOS subscription.
She and her husband thought about watching House of Cards, but she said they probably will skip it. ‘We’d be interested in getting to that if we could actually pull up the show,’ she said.”
Here’s hoping Netflix and Verizon can get this all figured out before poor Jen is the only woman left in America who doesn’t know what happened this season in House of Cards.
[via WSJ]
Respond
It’s because of the Net Neutrality ruling and service providers greed. Not Netflix.
AT&T Gigapower. #Boomstick
Plus Verizon is working with Redbox on its own streaming service to compete with Netflix.