jalaziz

Great to know. I think the fear is that so many companies are prioritizing AI workloads for the valuation bump rather than delivering actual meaningful value.

We faced this at my last company and this is actually a super mild case. In our case, we were dealing with call toll fraud. We ended up with tens of thousands of dollars in charges in less than 24 hours.

In our case, Twilio reached out to us to tell us they were detecting toll fraud. Before that, we actually had no idea what toll fraud was.

We quickly tried to address it with distributed rate limiting and that worked, for all of a couple of hours. The fraudsters quickly figured out the rate limit and worked around it by spacing out the calls and using more IPs.

Eventually, we had to disable a set of countries known for toll fraud and change our product to not connect calls in a variety of scenarios.

This letter is clearly not written by someone who interacts with customers. As someone who has tried to work with Elastic, their pricing is atrocious even for the most basic of features.

You can't get alerting without paying a king's ransom for features you'll likely never use.

I saw that and I can't speak for HBO Now, but my experience with WatchESPN (which apparently also streams through BAMTech) has been abysmal. This may be incredibly naive of me, but I'd much rather have an independent tech powerhouse like Netflix focused on content delivery.

In my experience, traditional media companies stifle innovation instead of encourage it. It was never easy to work with them and they held us back. The whole industry is a mess. I can't imagine Disney buying a controlling stake in BAMTech will make things better.

That being said, Disney is better with technology than most other media companies. Of course, I could be completely off-base here. It's just my opinion.

I think this is a terrible idea, but time will tell. As a former Hulu employee, I can say that the media rights business is a mess. It took us (and Netflix) a very long time to convince media companies that the future is streaming. Now that they understand that, it's natural that they want to control all the revenue streams for their content.

What they fail to understand is that online streaming is not easy. Netflix and Hulu have invested a lot of resources into their tech stacks. Also, have you tried building an app that works on all the different streaming devices out there? It's annoyingly difficult. You have to do all that, keep up with the latest technologies (e.g. 4K), and still provide unique features and value. Storing the content is the easiest part.

Point is, media companies should stick to what they do best and let the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon do what they do best.

Full disclosure, I work for Highfive.

My coworkers and I are here and ready to answer any questions!

I've been wondering the same thing. At the very least you should be able to argue that they've changed the contract and you should no longer be held liable for early termination.

I agree completely. My bet is this is Comcast's way of fighting back against net neutrality. With 4K streaming coming fast, it seems like they want to further pad those profit margins under the guise of fairness.

You're paying for a rate, not an absolute amount. The internet infrastructure works on that rate (bandwidth). You don't buy a 10GB switch or router, you buy a 1gbps switch or router. ISPs peer based on bandwidth.

I do understand, though, that by having a data cap they're encouraging users to use less of that bandwidth. However, again, they're just passing on costs to the consumer instead of paying a fixed cost to upgrade their peering arrangements.

Well aware of contention ratios. That's the gamble the ISP makes. Now they're trying to pass the risk onto the consumer. That shouldn't be the consumer's problem. That problem also doesn't quite relate to a data cap. Contention ratios are entirely dependent on bandwidth. If everyone in my neighborhood had a 250mbps connection and we all downloaded at full blast at the exact same time, sure we'd face an issue with contention ratios. The amount of data transferred doesn't matter though.