Time Warner obviously isn’t happy about Apple being their latest competitor in delivering movie rentals to the home. Their latest plan is to introduce a new billing scheme, a test to charge users by bandwidth consumption, that could crush Steve Jobs’s hopes and dreams for Apple TV. According to Bits, under Bell Canada’s bandwidth pricing plan — one which Time Warner it is looking to as a potential model for its own — customers would pay $30 each time they rented an HD movie from Apple TV, on top of Apple’s $3.99 rental fee. Apple’s plan to deliver HD movie rentals at the cheapest prices possible could be ruined very soon.
A Time Warner PR executive said “This is not targeted at people who download movies from Apple. This is aimed at people who use peer-to-peer networks and download terabytes.” I don’t understand what these companies have against peer-to-peer networks. They can be used for legal resources as much as they are for illegal ones. For example, Linux is distributed through BitTorrent, as well as Revision3′s video podcasts – peer-to-peer networks save expensive server bandwidth and can produce faster download speeds.
Apple TV should be safe for now – but beware of the ISPs charging you in the future.
Via [Valleywag]
"They can be used for legal resources as much as they are for illegal ones. For example, Linux is distributed through BitTorrent, as well as Revision3’s video podcasts"
You are never going to convince anyone that a significant proportion of torrent traffic is Linux distros and podcasts. It has some limited legal use but we all know P2P is used primarily for piracy, by a very wide margin.
The plot thickens! I hope the pro DRM people, the RCA, the government, whoever! would step in to make sure these services come across as cheap as possible. Of course, those who bit into the infamous $7,250 per 12-feet PearCable are not what I mean, them being beyond redemption.
This is how things look like in '08: cant get any better than this: CNet's <a href="5" rel="nofollow">http://reviews.cnet.com/4370-6466_7-170-101.html">5 big home audio.