This is almost /101/, but look at this lot, pretending they're reducing the bitrate to save this beleaguered society in our time of need, when really they're just cutting their bandwidth bill in anticipation of everyone's monthly usage going through the roof. Sanctimonious cunts.
Anyway. The BBC there are saying that a 2GB movie is HD. Are they just counting wrong (wouldn't be the first time), or are some of those paid streaming services actually that tight-fisted with their bitrate? I've been vaguely tempted to leave the "blurays and usegroups" approach behind. It's served me well, but it might be time to move on. I'll be fucked if I'm putting up with 2GB "HD" movies, though. Anyone use these things, any thoughts or observations?
>>27404 YouTube and Netflix are being cunts - but to a certain extent, they are simply responding to the pressure from the EU and the need to be "doing something". One would hope that EU regulators would be more concerned about medical supplies than bandwidth, but.
>>27404 If you shift as much data as Netflix does, you'd be a muppet to pay for transit bandwidth instead of peering. Netflix has some of the most resilient and scalable systems around. To get there, they've built and deployed Chaos Monkey, which randomly switches things off. They happily run it in production, so somewhere in the world right now something of theirs is down and nobody cares.
Netflix go well beyond peering - they provide free caching servers to ISPs, deployable down to the PoP level. If you're in a city, it's likely that your Netflix stream isn't travelling any further than your local telephone exchange.
Of course, none of that helps if ISPs have ridiculously high contention ratios. The problem is particularly acute for Virgin Media because of the architecture of DOCSIS - they can offer massive "up to" bandwidth, but they can't cope with peak demand.
