Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

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IMHO, the CEO is being disingenuous.

I apologize in advance for this rant:

T-Mobile knows exactly what it's doing. If they had announced an open platform with open specs for implementing low-bandwidth video, and then said "if you have this, we'll use it", the end result would be that everyone could benefit from an innovation of theirs.

Instead, they partnered up with the largest media providers to save themselves and those media providers money on bandwidth. He's smart enough to know that favoring companies that "have the technology to do this" really means favoring large corporations, which is bad for the little guys.

If this wasn't true, there wouldn't be "50 new companies applying" to take part in some application process to be approved... to be on their special little Internet. By even having an application to be involved, they're creating the framework for control and favoritism right from the start.

His creepy "we're just trying to help everyone and make the world a better place" stuff is not fooling anyone. T-Mobile is in it for themselves and themselves only. Keep your corruption away from our Internet and name your service something other than "Internet".

"His creepy "we're just trying to help everyone and make the world a better place" stuff is not fooling anyone."

So do you think that his twitter cheering squad are just sock puppets?

I think he is actually fooling people - far too many people. And now, because of this scumbag CEO, there are people who previously didn't know of the EFF who are now tweeting their dislike/opposition to the EFF.

People are so disenfranchised with their current providers that they will take the "underdogs" word at face value without doing any research to back it up.

We see many sock puppets these days. Some companies do their cruel things even on HN. Sure there is a fine line between fanboys and sock puppets, but some are either that starry-eyed, are employees or even get money for their postings.

Ugh :/

That is a disturbing thought.

"T-Mobile knows exactly what it's doing. If they had announced an open platform with open specs for implementing low-bandwidth video,"

Every streaming platform since RealVideo in the mid 90s has had a way to detect bandwidth and send low bandwidth video based on the amount of bandwidth available. You can download a free streaming server right now from either Apple or Adobe that can do it.

"and then said "if you have this, we'll use it", the end result would be that everyone could benefit from an innovation of theirs."

Does he really need to provide a link to Apple's or Adobe's free offering or the $600 WireCast solution? I've set up an bandwidth adaptive streaming solution for around $2000 (Mac Mini + BlackMagic Intensity + camcorder).

"He's smart enough to know that favoring companies that "have the technology to do this" really means favoring large corporations, which is bad for the little guys."

This "technology" to stream lower bitrate video based on available bit rate has been around for 20 years.

But for that technology to work you have to re-encode the source stream for every desired bandwidth range which is not exactly cheap [1]

[1] https://zencoder.com/en/file-transcoding/pricing

if you're a small outfit, you probably don't have enough video that you need to pay someone else to transcode. You can do it yourself using freely available tools Like HandBrake and some simple scripts, and throw a few spare computers at it. I know that Apple has some tools that use QuickTime to do it - and yes QuickTime uses standard H.264 encoding.

If you care about mobile, you should be encoding for low and high bandwidth anyway.

Again, I mostly deal with live streaming but the $2000 solution I mentioned above allows you to simultaneously stream at multiple bitrates.

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