Among other things (like saving on licensing fees), that's at least partially also because it's a lot more efficient to broadcast - it takes more energy and thereby cost to stream obscure bits to one user than to leverage the hot CDN caches and re-stream the same bits to millions of users. So there's a financial incentive to get everyone watching the same swaths of content (in addition to the social angle).
I expect that eventually we may even circle all the way back to time synchronized broadcasts, because it could be even more energy efficient to multicast than to unicast the bits.
We'll see.. right now, the tech for IP multicast doesn't work very well at internet scale, but if that changes...
Then again, to play my own devil's advocate, the surveillance capitalism aspect of building a profile of the users likes and dislikes and selling that data might be worth more than any savings on energy efficiency, so maybe streaming will remain flexible on the surface, to better continue to spy on users habits.
I had this same daily connection disruption problem with Xfinity on the east coast, on two different lines in the same building.
But, one difference is that the two lines would fail at different times, not at the exact same time (so not the cause guessed by Gemini, in my case).
I always assumed it was Comcast automating downtime to prevent anyone using the lines for business without paying Comcast Business prices.
I had the two locations connected by fiber and used multi WAN for both load balancing and failover, so the combined uptime was basically 100% because each line was down many times per day, but they were always down at different, non-overlapping times.
My guess is that this failure mode is quite common, whether or not it's intentional. I would love to see this be something a lot of us here can coordinate on jointly pushing Comcast to solve!
This is so very sad and so very ripe for disruption.
So many of the top players in our modern late stage capitalism economy fit this mold of having a terrible user experience with a large unsatisfied user base. Usually it's not even a monopoly, but all the top players are roughly equally awful to their users.
I'm tempted to start some companies to just do the thing in a way that doesn't suck for the actual paying customers. I think just doing a good/competent/user-needs-centric job at the same basic product would be enough to disrupt the market in many cases.
"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
This - we don't directly bit-address much in computing, so the idea that richness isn't there because of binary is kind of silly. The flexibility is there and you often pay for it either way.
On many 64-bit architectures, you actually waste 63 bits of extra padding for that boolean, for alignment reasons, unless you put some other useful data nearby in your struct (according to the alignment rules).
Luckily, this kind of waste doesn't happen often, but sadly, it does sometimes happen.
reply