ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? What the fuck happened to net neutrality?
The WHOLE POINT of the internet is that you don't have to deal with this sort of shit.
And people wonder why piracy still exists. I can get a 1080p copy of a movie from torrents no matter what ISP I'm on.
It's equivalent to you complaining about road neutrality should a company only deliver their products via Fedex trucks. The fact that the company chooses to only deliver their goods via Fedex doesn't affect your right to drive whatever street legal vehicle you want on the highway.
Within your ISP's network bandwidth is cheap, once it has to move over to other networks then those 5Mbps streams start adding up quite quickly. If 1600 people on an ISP were to steam in HD simultaneously (which really isn't a large number of people for a large ISP) then you're talking about 1GB (thats byte and not bit) of bandwidth every second. There's a reason why content distributions networks like Akamai and companies like Google tend to peer at ISPs as well.
What it certainly isn't is anything to do with net neutrality, and trying to claim that it is is either born of misunderstanding what net neutrality is, or trying to be deliberately obtuse. No one is prioritising one type of traffic over another, nor are they prioritising connections to one website over another. They're simply saying that there are real practical limitations involved in offering certain services, so they're partnering with any willing ISP to offer those services.
Yeah, uhh, okay. My ISP is the largest in the country. If you can't arrange your content sharing network with them, I'm fairly sure me calling a Tier 1 CSR reading off a scripted dialog is going to make all the difference in the world.
If Netflix is offering a service and can't even get the largest, most common ISP that their customers use to agree to their "free" peering arrangements to offer even better content, then that appears a little ... disappointing, and not particularly hope-inducing to me.
What's happening here is the opposite: Netflix can't afford the data at the price they're charging, so they cut a deal with Comcast where they (presumably) pay them for the right to cache static content locally. It no less onerous to the consumer, but it doesn't fit the policy goals that net neutrality is designed to enforce.
That said, your last point is dead on. Netflix has invented yet another way of making their service harder and more annoying to use for the poor consumer then The Pirate Bay.
No they haven't.
They're simply offering a 'better' service to a subset of their customers, they're not stopping you from watching a film if you don't use an ISP that peers with them.
Ironically, my 105mbps cable connection with Comcast. The SuperHD service tells me to "Ask my ISP to join the Open Connect Network", helpfully.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell
Netflix: Okay, everyone can have HD movies now, but they cost more. Also, only if your ISP supports it because hey these require 5Mbps from edge locations. So it's the same as before just more expensive.
w1ntermute: What the fuck? They want to charge extra money for movies that my ISP is capable of delivering for free? This is why piracy exists.