Quote Originally Posted by recoveryone View Post
The argument will be between DSL and cable bandwidth and when Fios becomes avialble nation wide DSL will go by the way side.
Unfortunately, FiOS expansion is at a dead end. Verizon pulled the plug on their national fiber expansion plans last year.

FiOS Expansion Winding Down: If It's Not Already In Your Area, It Probably Won't Be

Basically, if your area does not currently have FiOS service (and that would include the SF Bay Area where I live), it won't be offered. Verizon's priority for FiOS is adding fiber capacity and filling in the coverage gaps within the regions where they already offer the service.

Quote Originally Posted by recoveryone
Most cable compaines offer between 7-25Mbps and Fios starts around 10Mbps to 25Mbps. With that type of bandwidth will really boost the streaming market and support full HD PQ, but sound may still be around Stereo or maybe surround, maybe some of our forum data experts can inform us on how much date transfer rate is needed for full DD.
The issue as video streaming becomes more popular is with ISPs throttling the downstreams from video servers, and implementing usage caps. Usage caps have now arrived for residential broadband service. AT&T started capping its DSL customers back in May, and the month before that Comcast did the same thing. The other national ISPs are expected to follow suit. The data caps currently range from 150 to 250 GB/month.

My prior thread on this subject breaks down what it means in terms of video streaming usage. I estimated that a 150 GB cap would allow for about 5-6 hours of streaming on Netflix, but this goes way down when going with HD resolution. Consider that iTunes HD movie downloads consume roughly 2 GB per hour of content, and you can do the math on how quickly the cap gets reached with normal viewing.

AT&T To Cap Monthly Broadband Usage: Big Implications for Streaming Video Users

There are a lot of chess pieces currently in play, and consider that the residential broadband providers that control over 90% of the market (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox) are also in the pay TV business.

I think the market factors currently limiting broad adoption of video streaming (about 60% of households view some form of streaming video on a regular basis, but the average daily viewing time for streaming video is less than 20 minutes, compared to 5+ hours for TV viewing) are as follows:

1) Balkanized Formats and Providers
Just look at the list of streaming video providers, all of which have different programming choices, pricing plans, supported platforms, and user experiences. It's a mess and all the confusing options are a huge incentive to keep cable/satellite service

2) Insufficient Bandwidth
The average bandwidth for US residential broadband service is somewhere just north of 3.0 Mbps, which can barely support a HD video stream. Broadband service is a high overhead, low margin service, and the telcos are going to squeeze as much as they can out of their existing infrastructure. They have minimum incentive to lay out huge investments to upgrade their capacity and speeds, because they know much of that would support video streaming -- something that the major ISPs' pay TV services directly compete against.

3) Content Deals and Cost Escalation
At a time when video streaming options have begun proliferating, the content itself is becoming more and more entrenched with the existing pay TV providers. Sports programming in particular has seen content deals venturing into the multi-billion dollar range with decade long commitments. With these content deals, the online viewing options for local pro teams will remain highly restricted. A similar dynamic is taking shape with cable channel developing their own streaming video platforms, and some of them putting their best programs behind a paywall. In some cases, as with HBO, you need to subscribe to HBO (and thus, subscribe to cable/satellite) in order to view their programs online.

Netflix's content deals have also seen tenfold fee increases as their earlier contracts come up for renewal. These increases are far outpacing their subscriber growth, so fee increases for consumers are inevitable. Basically, no one video streaming service can replicate the viewing options that consumers are used to, so they will need to cobble together different streaming options, each of which have limitations and carries its own cost.