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Saturday, February 17, 2018

Cutting the Cord, or Why We Need Network Neutrality

Cable TV companies are among the most despised in the nation. Their employees are surly and uninformed, their service is terrible, their prices have risen two or three times faster than inflation, and they make you pay for hundreds of channels you don't care about and will never watch. That's because they're monopolies, and have been free to do whatever the hell they want after Congress deregulated them 20 years ago.

When cable companies started using their monopoly position to provide Internet access, it only got worse. They claimed they had the right to charge not only their customers for their Internet access, but the companies that sent their customers data. They claimed they had the right to slow down or block any company that they felt used too many "network resources," but really they wanted to shut down companies like Netflix that provided streaming video that competed with their core entertainment business.

Obama's FCC instituted "network neutrality" to prevent cable companies from screwing their customers and other businesses. The FCC classified internet providers as common carriers (like phone companies) who can't discriminate against other businesses.

The Trump administration, of course, is getting rid of the policy because the cable industry has given Republicans tons of campaign contributions.

Net neutrality can save many Americans $1,000 a year.
To see why network neutrality is important, let's look at a real-world scenario. A scenario that could save many Americans $500 to $1,000 a year.

For the last eight or ten years there's been a lot of talk about cord cutters -- people who get rid of their cable TV subscriptions and use antennas to receive broadcast TV over the air, or subscribe to services that stream cable-TV content over the Internet.

These services have historically have not been very good. They don't have all the channels people want and quality has been rather choppy. Worse, they didn't have the local TV stations that people depend on for weather forecasts and local news.

That has all changed: it's now possible -- in many areas of the country -- to cut the cord and get pretty much the same local and cable programming that your cable company provides. For a fraction of the price!

Last year CenturyLink, our DSL provider, ran a fiber optic cable down the main street near our house. Recently they offered a life-time guaranteed price of $50/month for 80 megabit internet. It's not the gimmick that the cable companies always offer, where they give you a deal for three months and then triple the price. In 20 years our DSL provider has never raised the guaranteed price. Instead they drastically increase the data rate for a marginal, guaranted-for-life price increase.

In that same time frame Comcast's prices has more than doubled, to more than $100/month with no improvement in service. They just keep adding more worthless channels we never watch. So we decided to dump Comcast.

We tried an antenna, but we live in a very hilly suburb and the transmitters are 20 miles away. The signal is awful with indoor antennas, and putting an antenna on the roof is a hassle and might not even work. So we decided on streaming.

We looked at four services that stream cable programming and local channels: YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling and DirecTV Now (which is not the satellite TV service). They're all comparably priced and have similar features: full HD, live-streaming of local and cable channels including movies and sports, a DVR feature (with varying release dates, capabilities and costs), and access to on-demand libraries of shows and movies that appear on the supported networks. All of them let you try the service for a week for free, and they're all in the $35-40 price range. Some of them have 4K capability.

Their channel lineups aren't identical, and will vary by region. We picked YouTube TV, which has all the channels we care about except for the local PBS affiliate, but as public TV supporters we have access to PBS's streaming service, which gives you access to episodes of shows like Victoria before they're aired on local stations.

But we would have been happy with DirecTV Now or Sling; both were fine. DirecTV Now has a distinct advantage of charging only $5/month to add HBO. Hulu had more restrictions, was more expensive, and was less reliable than the others, but it does include access to a huge library of TV shows going back decades.

YouTube TV includes some channels that Comcast charged extra for (like TCM, ESPNU, the Olympic Channel), so we're paying $50 a month less to get more of the things that we want.

Some of the services don't have access to Comedy Central, the local CBS or the CW affiliates, perhaps because Comedy Central, CBS and CW have their own streaming services (CC's and CW's are free, CBS's is $6), or they just haven't finished negotiations yet. YouTube TV is still actively adding channels (TBS/TNT came online just last week).

Furthermore, if you have limited viewing habits, you can save even more money. ESPN is introducing their streaming service this spring for only $5/month. HBO's streaming service is $15/month. There are also tons of other on-demand streaming services, like Amazon and Netflix, that have large libraries of shows or offer pay-per-view movies and shows.

You can stream through a browser with your computer, through an app on your smart phone, or through several different streaming devices. We went with a streaming device because using a computer is a hassle when you're sitting on the couch, and would rather use a remote than our phones.

Most of these streaming devices are tiny compared to computers or even cable TV set-top boxes: Roku's Streaming Stick, Google Chromecast, Amazon's Firestick use WiFi and connect invisibly to your TV's HDMI port. We went with the Roku Ultra because we wanted a traditional TV remote and a wired connection. Many of these devices allow you to "cast" the stream from your smart phone to the TV screen, if that's your thing.

You will, of course, need a decent Internet connection to use these streaming services. Looking at the stats on our Roku box, it looks like it uses about 4 megabits, so at least an 8 megabit connection is needed.

Sadly, TiVo does not work with most of these streaming services, though there's no technical reason it could not: it works fine with Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. TiVo with cable has a better interface and user experience than Roku or YouTube TV. TiVo's wishlists are very nice, and the commercial skip feature is great. But it's just not worth almost a thousand dollars a year.

We're lucky that we live in an area that has two Internet providers: Comcast and CenturyLink. But a lot of people don't have any choice: they only have Comcast or some other giant cable company that has a government-sanctioned monopoly on cable and Internet service.

These streaming services are bringing competition and innovation into America's living rooms. Net neutrality is needed to guarantee that all Americans have equal access to the information and entertainment services, and that new companies have an equal opportunity to compete against companies that were granted monopolies by cities and states decades ago.

This kind of competition could save the average American consumer $500 to $1,000 dollars a year. Which is a hell of lot more money than middle-class Americans will see from Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy.

But without net neutrality Comcast can shut out millions of Americans from these services, taking billions of dollars out of their pockets.

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