February 24, 2014
Streaming video service Netflix has agreed to pay Comcast, the largest internet service provider in the United States, for direct access to the ISP’s network.
The arrangement — confirmed over the weekend first by the Wall Street Journal — will ensure that Netflix customers who rely on Comcast for their home internet service will have an easier time accessing content delivered through the streaming site.
In a joint statement, the two companies described the deal as “a mutually beneficial interconnection agreement that will provide Comcast’s US broadband customers with a high-quality Netflix video experience for years to come.”
At the same time, though, the deal means that for perhaps the first time ever a major ISP has agreed to accept money — likely millions of dollars — so that a web service can send content to subscribers as seamlessly as possible, in turn raising some real questions about the future of net neutrality and the internet business as it exists today.
Both parties involved have declined to discuss the dollar figure involved in the deal. According to the few details that have been disclosed, however, Comcast will reportedly make sure that streaming Netflix content sent through the ISP’s system will reach subscribers faster than ever by eliminating a middle man in the equation.
Up until now, data distributed by Netflix or a similar website is carried on a backbone internet provider — one of the largest web systems that much of the country’s e-info transverses — but also usually mirrored by another backbone provider that gives content to an ISP, then an individual user.
Under the terms of the new deal, Netflix will reportedly send its data straight to Comcast — an ISP with millions of customers around the globe — and bypass the middleman directly.
One of those intermediaries is a company called Cogent Communications, and up until now they have been used as a primary route between Netflix and Comcast, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal this week. For months, however, the huge swaths of data being sent by Netflix to Cogent has caused internet congestion that keeps Netflix customers from being able to quickly watch movies on-the-fly without experiencing long load times and buffering obstacles