T-Mobile Wants to be Your Uncarrier Cable TV Company

DooKey

DooKey

[H]F Junkie
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T-Mobile announced plans to enter the cable TV market and compete with the big boys for your entertainment dollars. The service is going to be available in 2018 and it's going to leverage technology and services of Layer3 TV. Layer3 TV currently provides a-la-carte channel selection in a limited number of cities and that leads me to believe that's the exact business model T-Mobile plans to use in this endeavor. Bring on the competition and lower prices is all I can say. Check out the announcement video (WARNING mild foul language) below. I love this guy.

Watch the video here.
 
Guess I'm going to have to find this story elsewhere.

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oROEchimaru said:
You work for free?

lol
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I've always said that the internet started to go downhill the moment anyone expected to make money on it.

It was much better when it was just geeks with servers under their desks at universities and workplaces doing it for the love of their geeky topic.

If I have to see ads, I go elsewhere. For my select few sites I freequent (like the [H]) I contribute with donations, in the case of the [H] via Patreon.

I absolutely will not put up with ads under any circumstance.
 
Can't watch videos at work, and cant read that article.

So, it looks like they acquired Layer3 TV which I have never heard of before.

I am currently reading this older article to try to find out more about them.
 
I don't find anything on TV worth watching. Most content that I like is either on HBO or Netflix. Other things I watch are just videos on youtube.
 
panhead said:
With the demise of NN, cable companies will just block this and charge 89.99/mo to unblock.
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Anyone who actually thinks that doesn't really understand how the internet works.

The massive amount of money required to make a database of IPs attributed to one service or another means this will never happen.

How do you know if any arbitrary IP address is someone's personal website, a VPN, a CDN, some random VPS, or someone's house connection? The answer is you can't.

Even Comcast uses Amazon Web Services to serve VoIP. They aren't gonna throttle themselves.
 
When I lookup Layer3 TV for my zip code, all they offer is a Platinum allHD™ package for $75+taxes.
Not the competition I'm looking for. That's just as expensive as my current cable.
 
I still have to get internet from my cable company. Until someone can provide me 100Mb wireless internet without a cap, I am stuck with cable.
 
DigitalisAkujin said:
Anyone who actually thinks that doesn't really understand how the internet works.
The massive amount of money required to make a database of IPs attributed to one service or another means this will never happen.
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Anyone who thinks the ISPs won't spend massive amounts of money to turn the internet into a 21st century cable TV box doesn't know or understand how the ISPs work.
ISPs don't have to determine what all the traffic is, they just whitelist what sites you are paying for. Everything else is blocked.
 
nutzo said:
When I lookup Layer3 TV for my zip code, all they offer is a Platinum allHD™ package for $75+taxes.
Not the competition I'm looking for. That's just as expensive as my current cable.
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Because they just bought the company and the service won't roll out until 2018.
 
DigitalisAkujin said:
Anyone who actually thinks that doesn't really understand how the internet works.

The massive amount of money required to make a database of IPs attributed to one service or another means this will never happen.

How do you know if any arbitrary IP address is someone's personal website, a VPN, a CDN, some random VPS, or someone's house connection? The answer is you can't.

Even Comcast uses Amazon Web Services to serve VoIP. They aren't gonna throttle themselves.
Click to expand...

It's not that hard -- a) check the ASN. b) check the SNI on the TLS, c) if it's not TLS look at the content. This covers probably 90% of the IPs, and just slow roll the rest.
 
If T-mo is buying out Layer3 who is Verizon going to acquire to distribute video? AT&T already is deploying DirectTV Now streaming service.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I've always said that the internet started to go downhill the moment anyone expected to make money on it.

It was much better when it was just geeks with servers under their desks at universities and workplaces doing it for the love of their geeky topic.

If I have to see ads, I go elsewhere. For my select few sites I freequent (like the [H]) I contribute with donations, in the case of the [H] via Patreon.

I absolutely will not put up with ads under any circumstance.
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There was a second option to not see ads, you pay $1.
 
At some point, all TV will be over IP. Then we'll be back to bitching about prices again, as Sling won't be able to keep their base $20 and $25 packages forever
 
We really are headed in the direction of have very few options of what TV, cell phone, and internet service we have. I mean the 4 main carriers are all getting into TV and streaming content. Its a matter of time until they start price fixing (not that collusion from these guys isn't already occurring).
When do they get to big to where you can't fight them legally and the just stick you in ligation until your broke?
 
toast0 said:
It's not that hard -- a) check the ASN. b) check the SNI on the TLS, c) if it's not TLS look at the content. This covers probably 90% of the IPs, and just slow roll the rest.
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Oh what a silly assumption that all these connections are encrypted.
 
I looked it up and no service for my area. which really begs the question.. how, if its purely over the internet, is service not available??
 
Exavior said:
There was a second option to not see ads, you pay $1.
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Yeah, I can't pay even one buck to ever article I get linked to. That is just not a feasible way of doing things.

I have no problem paying a single source, but paying each of the thousands of publication I read just one article from a month a subscription is just not a feasible model, especially considering I'd have to give each my payment information (a risk) and maintain accounts on each site (a nightmare to keep track of, I try to minimize the number of accounts in my life)

Now, if there were some sort of single interface system that could dole out a few pennies from a "web reading wallet" per link I read, I'd get onboard with something like that. (I vaguely remember someone trying to do this in the 90's for webcomics, and the effort failing amidst much ridicule)

With a few narrow exceptions that I do pay for, (including the H) I just don't consume information on a per publication basis anymore. That model is outdated. Most people consume news and information on a per link model, based on what their friends and acquaintances share on social media, or their favorite news aggregator links to, possibly to never read another article from that publication again.

Paying a subscription for an entire site is a model that just does not work.

I don't mind sites that carry subtle, non-animated ads that don't distract you from the content you came from, and that don't carry special tracking cookies or malware, but since most sites use one service or another (usually Google) and advertisers go live instantly on those services without any human reviewing the content first, none of them can be trusted, and thus all must be blocked.
 
panhead said:
With the demise of NN, cable companies will just block this and charge 89.99/mo to unblock.
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Actually, there are other regulations on the books, pre-NN regulations, that prevent this kind of abuse. And those regulations are not being rolled back. But don't let me interrupt your apocalyptic fantasy.
 
PaulP said:
Actually, there are other regulations on the books, pre-NN regulations, that prevent this kind of abuse. And those regulations are not being rolled back. But don't let me interrupt your apocalyptic fantasy.
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Sure hope you are right, but history is not on your side. The ISPs have been doing this for quite a while.
 
Hopefully a rollout near me. I'll sign up day 1. I'm so disgusted with Comcast that I would literally pay MORE for the same service just to deny them revenue. Same reason I jumped ship from Verizon to T-Mobile, though VZW sure got a lot more amicable to not billing me double rates for half the data once their subscriber numbers started dropping.
 
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