This week an online campaign “Stop The Meter” has been spreading throughout online social channels against Canadian ISP’s metering bandwidth usage. ISP’s have long been lobbying the CRTC to allow them to impose pay per usage metering on bandwidth, a model similar to that used by mobile providers in Canada to charge users on data plans. At first glance you may think that yeah this makes sense. The cost of business has gone up and data is supposedly more expensive to transmit, and we’re consuming more and more every day. Looking a little closer at the issue may raise some suspicions.
Enter Netflix, low cost broadband delivery of your favourite TV shows. Considering the price point many Canadians are pondering cutting the “cord” on television services altogether. From a monetary standpoint this makes total sense. Unlimited television content delivered for $8 a month when basic cable costs upwards of $40 a month, did I mention its on demand all the time? Sure the Netflix selection is a little light right now but in time it could become rich in content. This really threatens traditional television service providers in Canada. Solution? Make the delivery mechanism which you control more expensive. Seems like motive to me.
According to Suisse media analyst Spencer Wang:
“…Netflix can lead to a material increase in broadband data usage–in this case roughly 20 gigabytes of data for the month or roughly 1 GB per hour of standard definition online viewing. Based on Rogers Communications’ data pricing structure, this would have resulted in a $12 per month increase in broadband…”
In essence imposed bandwidth caps and metering from ISP’s would force price conscious consumers away from consuming rich content through their internet connection affecting more than just Netflix. Online video consumption in Canada as a whole would suffer. Canadians consume online video quite rabidly, through YouTube, news media, and broadcast network websites. This could have other residual effects on advertising and publishers as Canadians would become more conscious of what they consume online. Netflix is worried, but really all of us should be. Moves like this by the CRTC and ISP’s could seriously erode our collective online experience.
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