Interesting graphs and charts department

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Broadband providers are trying to get Netfllix to pay for more bandwidth at their end of the pipe. Comcast has convinced Netflix to pay. Other providers such as Dish are making it a marketing question.

But shortly after this issue became serious - last summer, roughly - someone came out with "Popcorn Time", an app that streams Hollywood movies using peer-to-peer networking. No longer would you have to rely on both your end and the Netflix end of the pipe being large enough - basically, your stream comes from 1000 different points on the network, and if one of them is clogged or blocked, it just uses the other 999. And you pay nothing.

Once again, when they think they can get a toehold, the major players forget this simple fact:

WE ARE IN CHARGE HERE, AND WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WANT.

The hitch: Popcorn Time is totally illegal. It's piracy. The crazy thing: you benefit from piracy even if you don't use it, because it provides an unstoppable free alternative representing what people want, and the big corporations are forced to compete with it no matter what. If content is expensive, piracy goes up. If content is hard to get, piracy answers that.

Y'know, after a certain point in time, you could always get Hollywood movies illegally on the net - you just couldn't stream them. You could connect to whatever peer-to-peer networks were around, and download your entire Hollywood movie, and then watch it. In the early days it might take a few days to download it. Now, you can download it in minutes.

And as always, piracy provided a superior product, without unskippable previews, and without those FBI warnings saying you aren't supposed to pirate your movies.

This is the real reason why the "Netflix is not fast enough" problem won't be a long-term problem: Hollywood's interests are in providing what people need to NOT go the piracy route. It will take a little time for those interests to express themselves to the providers, but they are all one now and the market disruption is really quite amazing.