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So in the last paragraph the author imagines a dystopian future where you have to plan which movie you are going to watch tomorrow so Netflix can pre-download i

• benplumley 11y ago
  Actually, he said that if you were to download during peak hours, it should cost ten cents per gigabyte. You'd have the option to download at no cost during off-peak hours. The alternative, what is really happening in some parts of the US today, is that you will be charged a dollar per gigabyte whether or not the line is currently congested. Obviously they're both pretty terrible compared to how other countries and companies do it (no caps at all), but I certainly prefer his solution over Comcast's if I'm forced to choose.
• icebraining 11y ago
  A decade or so ago, back when 256kbps was the average cable speed and there were caps for international traffic here in Portugal, our ISP had something called Happy Hours, which meant that all usage between 1-9am didn't count for the cap. We didn't "plan which movie we were going to watch tomorrow", we just marked them for download (on locally-adapted forks of P2P software like eMule, with time/IP range filters) whenever we found an interesting one, and then we'd have 20-30 to choose from when we actually felt like watching a movie. And we could still watch a different one, it was just somewhat more "expensive". It was far from a dystopian scenario, and frankly I wouldn't mind returning to that model if it could save me 20% on my bill.