It seems that the recently ‘in the news’ company ‘Netflix’; an American provider of on-demand internet streaming media in the States, Canada, and Latin America has got itself a deal distributing DreamWorks Animation films to its online customers. “Recently in the news?” Just last week’s Netfilx had told its online subscribers about a pending price hike – which didn’t go down well! Netfilx CEO; Reed Hastings emailed subscribers with an apology about the way it had been done, which initially gave impression he would be reversing recent price increases. Not so! Instead of saying sorry for the increases, he merely said sorry for the way it had been done , he then went on to describe a new business model which could be more inconvenient for his customers – not good for business!
Netflix’s current contract with Americas channel; ‘HBO’ runs until the end of 2013, it;s said the new contract will have started by then. Netflix and the studio are very up-beat about the partnership and say that the contract; said to be worth $30m is the first time a major Hollywood studio has chosen internet streaming over pay TV.
As for “DreamWorks” – a chief exec said “This is a game-changing deal,” continuing; ”We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed.”
The deal should be a welcome boost to Netflix’s fortunes, which have been flagging of late. Netfilx upset many of American users when it decided to separate its DVD and streaming rentals units into two different websites. What with that and the increase in prices – Netflix need some good news!
If you were wondering; Netfilx isn’t in operational in the UK – yet. May-be that’s a good job with the rise of copper theft! How is any company going to be able to ‘pipe’ anything around the UK with the increase in cable theft – given the price of copper on the worlds markets?
Take BT, for instance. British Telecom, here in the UK say they have 75 million miles of copper cable running throughout the land! Let’s do the maths; Ten pairs of copper wires weighs about 132kg per mile; so BT have about 10 million tonnes of copper! Do the final sum – say copper is over £5,000 a tonne, it all works out to around £50bn! A lot of cash!
Why are we using copper anyway? Why not Fibre? What about fibre? Fibre
is a lot stronger than steel but doesn’t have infinite bandwidth – at least not the multimode fiber used in most premises networks that’s a lot higher than copper, but as you approach gigabit speeds, you are limiting the distances available for links to 500 meters or so. How about cost? Isn’t that the bottom line for copper vs. fibre? Well, fibre prices continue to fall while copper prices rise so Fibre makes more sense – the majority of backbones in large companies are fibre. They want the bandwidth and reliability of fibre, and the networking equipment supliers recommend fibre for the backbone of a network. Companies will always expect to upgrade to higher bandwidth in the future, and only fibre offers upgradeability.
BT’s copper is worth more than BT itself! Now we all know that Fibre is an important component of a healthy balanced diet – why not an important part of our broadband network? - More ‘Fibre’ anyone?
