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Re:Observations of an Internet Middleman by jessaustin on Monday May 05, 2014 @04:04PM (#7700829)
Indeed: perhaps the answer to the symmetry argument is for Netflix clients to just start uploading scads of random data while the movie is streaming. Then the traffic will be "symmetric", although Comcast won't like it after all the last-mile upload links are saturated and customers can't do anything online.
Re:Observations of an Internet Middleman by exelius on Monday May 05, 2014 @04:19PM (#7700923)
Netflix hasn't done this (and likely won't) because would make it difficult/impossible to control the quality of their service. P2P connections are a bit of a crap-shoot based on things like router configuration, device type and resources. For example, P2P wouldn't work as well on an iPad where you're only caching a few hundred megs of video (and not the whole video) at any given time.
Re:Observations of an Internet Middleman by dllthomas on Monday May 05, 2014 @04:29PM (#7701001)
I don't think the parent meant to imply a P2P implementation of Netflix streaming video, just that Netflix is perfectly capable of making that ratio balance out by uploading crap from the clients they have (partial) control over - which would then be traffic coming from Comcast's network.
Re:Observations of an Internet Middleman by jessaustin on Monday May 05, 2014 @04:35PM (#7701049)
Thank you, I was having trouble imagining how I could have been that unclear.