Marshall, you say "of course the numbers are going to be absurd" but up until L3 started streaming Netflix data they weren't. So there is no "of course" about it. There is nothing unusual about what Comcast is asking. All major backbone providers have peering agreements with each other and if the volume of data goes too far out of balance like this then it's only natural the party bearing the brunt of it is going to look for some sort of compensation. Bandwidth isn't free. I'm not a Comcast defender (I've hated them for years). But I really do feel this is one time that Comcast is in the right.

Look at all these kneejerk comments. Do any of you even understand what is being talked about here? L3 and Comcast have some sort of agreement where they can send data to each other's networks. This agreement apparently counts on the amount of data being balanced. But L3 is sending 5x the amount of data to Comcast that Comcast is sending to them. Comcast wants L3 to pay for this imbalance. Why is this unreasonable? Sure, Comcast has an incentive to hinder Netflix any way it can but you can't expect them to ignore something like this.

This seems to be a growing trend. The people and companies that develop, design, and supply our technology are increasingly unable to handle it. How many of the high tech devices in your home work better than their predecessors of 10 years ago? My Samsung Bluray players chokes on movies all the time and needs frequent updates. DVDs never had issues like this. My digital cable box freezes up and is sluggish as hell but the old analog one never did and was lightning quick when changing channels. My new PC once suffered from crippling hard drive issues that were caused by obscure settings that required hours of combing the web reading hundreds of unanswered pleas for help. Are things really improving? Ok, sure. Bluray looks nice on large TVs and sounds great with a great sound system but they couldn't stop there. They had to add all sorts of useless features (BD Live, DRM) that only increase user frustration because no one in the industry can seem to get on the same page. And yes, my cable TV now has nice things like On Demand and a searchable guide and high definition (which often looks terrible anyway due to lousy compression) but are these features worth it if the cable box locks up and prevents me from even watching TV? And of course my PC is 1000 times more capable than what I had 10 years ago and when it works right it's a multi-tasking miracle but it's getting harder and harder to diagnose the issues that can occur. I'm not a Luddite. I guess I'm just getting tired of incompetent firmware developers. Maybe that's what it all boils down to. Is firmware getting too complicated to handle or are people no longer going to school to learn how to do this stuff properly? Or both? Sorry. I'm just getting fed up.

Not that I care about the window all that much but I strongly doubt they have any idea of how effective this policy is based on the sales numbers of a few DVDs. I wonder how accurate their sales predictions are generally.