14 DAY TRIAL // The drama going on between Netflix and Comcast is bordering on something between annoying and amusing. The two companies are supposed to be working together, but all they do is throw mud at each other, although the reasons behind this are quite understandable.
The latest round sees Comcast as the attacker, as the Internet Service Provider has accused Netflix of slowing down its own streams, effectively passing the blame over to the video streaming service.
Basically, Comcast is saying that those considerable speed drops that Netflix accused it of weren’t its fault at all. Instead, Netflix has been sabotaging its own platform.
The two companies signed a deal back in February, which offered Netflix access to the Internet highway. Ever since then, they’ve been fighting on and off. It all started with Reed Hasting, Netflix’s CEO, posting a blog accusing Comcast of bullying them into the deal and giving the company no other choice but to sign, while also pressuring the FCC to force everyone to abide by net neutrality rules.
Comcast has since been trying to clean up its image, claiming that Netflix has walked into this whole deal on its own accord and that it was free to do the same with any other provider out there.
Now, after Netflix threw another batch of mud over at Comcast over these past few days by opposing the ISP’s desired merger with Time Warner Cable and noting just how much better Netflix was performing over Comcast’s network since the deal, the service provider is fighting back.
“As at least one independent commentator has pointed out, it was not Comcast that was creating viewability issues for Netflix customers, it was Netflix’s commercial transit decisions that created these issues,” reads a post signed by Comcast Vice President of Content Delivery Ken Florance.
However, Florance’s statement doesn’t seem to be just trash talk, but is rather based on an article written by industry analyst Dan Rayburn back in March.
There, Rayburn said that Netflix had actually done things behind the scenes that made matters worse and strongly affected the quality of the content reaching users. Basically, he said that Netflix sent its traffic to Cogent, a broadband provider that worked as a middleman between Comcast and Netflix.
Cogent is a small enough player that it doesn’t really have the capacity to handle Netflix’s huge traffic requirements. He then wrote that in reality, it was Netflix that was to blame for continuing to send traffic to the middleman, when there were plenty of other alternatives.