I think Comcast, owner of NBC Universal, has little ground to stand on here. Streaming is an inefficient use of the Internet that is popular only because people are too terrified of lawsuits to use better technologies like BitTorrent. Comcast has worked hard to set up the legal environment that created this situation; they will see no sympathy from me.

In most cases, streaming is basically no different than downloading, right? The vast majority of people watch a video only once.

So it's more like saying "downloading is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable."

Sure, but it doesn't have to be that way. Something built around multicast groups could be used to stream multiple people the same content in a drastically more efficient manner, and then it could be stored locally on clients for time-shifting purposes.

If you're trying to optimize for efficient use of limited bandwidth, unicast transferring of identical content to many many people is pretty wasteful. I think Netflix would argue that network links should be getting bigger and fatter to render the point moot, but given the streams are also getting bigger (we didn't always stream 720p everywhere, did we?) that would certainly take a lot more investment than what's happening now.

That's not true. Backbone pays for long haul to meet me room. ISP pays for last mile from meet me to consumer. Comcast decided to not only not pay for interchange equipment, but also to charge twice for traffic. Classic monopolist move.

It's worse than that. If you look at how much bandwidth is required for any-to-any connectivity you can approximate how much it costs by modelling the internet as a full graph. Of course the cost of a full graph internet is n(n-1), with n the number of customers.

The problem is, what happens when you connect a new customer. Well, simple :

1) the income of the ISP increases by some fixed amount

2) the cost of providing this connection increases by n+1 (the number of existing customers)

So here's the catch

np needs to pay for n(n-1)c pipes

Where n is the number of customers on the internet. P is the average income per customer and c is the cost of a pipe that will sustain one customer.

Needless to say, this won't work.

Approximating the Internet to a complete graph with edges of equal cost is absurd, that's not how it operates at all.

True, but people claiming: "I pay for XXX Mbit/s, I want my XXX Mbit/s 100% of time to 100% of the Internet" think/want the Internet to operate like that.