The cable guys finally got a win in the OTT sector, scoring big on Netflix's first of its promised monthly report cards on streaming delivery.
As we reported earlier this week, Charter Communications, which just announced a big deal to use TiVo as their STB provider, received kudos from Netflix as the best ISP in the U.S. when it came to handling its HD streams, with 2.67 Megabits per second average during the three-month period that ended Jan. 15. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevision, Suddenlink and Cable One all scored throughout over 2.2 Mbps.
The telcos grabbed the middle ground of the 16 operators tracked, with Verizon, AT&T, Windstream, BellSouth, Embarq and Qwest coming in between 2.0 and 2.2 Mbps. Clearwire, CenturyTel (which just acquired Embarq) and Frontier Communications were at the tail end.
Ditto the picture in Canada, where cable operators Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications out performed Bell Canada and Telus.
Netflix Director of Content Delivery Ken Florance said the company is "using a time-weighted bitrate metric to represent the effective data throughput our subscribers receive over many of the top ISPs." It's also filtering for titles that have HD streams available, and for devices capable of playing HD streams (which also filters out mobile networks), to highlight what's achievable in terms of HD performance on the various ISP networks.
For more:
- see this blog from Netflix
- see this article
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