Suzie Felber's kids are only just learning what a commercial is.
"They start screaming when they come on," she says. "They think the TV's broken."
The Felbers usually stream television shows over the Internet in their New Jersey home.
More and more people are following suit, using services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. But these programs take up a huge amount of digital bandwidth, and that's led to a dispute between these services and the Internet service providers that carry them.
Slower Service
The Felbers access the Internet through Verizon FiOS, and it's worked pretty well — until recently. Felber says a few days ago she and her husband were trying to watch the blockbuster Netflix series House of Cards, and something weird happened.
"It went from high def to low def, but it wasn't high def very much and then it was pixelating, like the game Minecraft, it was just little boxes," she says. "It looked sort of like when we tried to watch video over the Internet in 1998."
The same thing appears to have happened to many Netflix customers in recent days, just as the second season of House of Cards was being released. Richard Broughton, head of broadband at IHS, says such programs take up a lot of digital bits and bytes.
"As these are really taking off, and as people watch more and more video, obviously that means the effect is multiplied many, many times over," he says, "and it's this that's causing the immediate strain on the networks."
This has provoked a simmering conflict between video companies like Netflix and the Internet service providers they rely on. Big providers like Verizon have made no secret of the fact they resent the huge strain on their networks.
"Just using the Netflix example — it uses a lot of bandwidth and it takes money and a lot of infrastructure to support that, and it also has implications for the rest of the traffic," says Jeff Silva, a telecommunications analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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