Quote:
Originally Posted by alchav21
The UK and other countries are far behind when it comes to Digital HD Streaming. I don't think most have the Infrastructure or knowledge, that's why they are sticking to Disc and probably SD Streaming. Even here in the US most people don't have the Bandwidth for consistent Digital HD Streaming. Our Copper Infrastructure is Obsolete, and AT&T and Verizon are just waking up to this fact. Digital HD Streaming is just a given, and Disc will fade sooner than anyone thinks!
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As a serious response to this, even if this were true, it still fundamentally has little to nothing to do with the issue at hand regarding this service provider in the UK removing content.
You are talking about infrastructure from the standpoint of
delivering content from the source/provider to the end customer (i.e. referring to obsolete copper infrastructure, bandwidth, SD vs HD quality, etc.).
But that really isn't the issue here. This service provider apparently doesn't have much of a problem offering streaming content in general, and apparently the end users are generally able to use it just fine, regardless of whether it is only available in SD or if they also offer it in HD or 4K.
The problem is that the service provider apparently doesn't want to pay for the additional server/hard drive/etc. space that would be required to store all of the existing content that they offer and any and all new, incoming content... and instead are opting to remove some old content to make space for the new content, despite the fact that the information on their site specifically says that people will have access to their purchased content "forever," because somewhere in the fine print is a clause that says content can be removed at any time for any reason. Frankly I consider that to be false advertising. (IMO any kind of digital download/streaming purchases should not be allowed to legally be advertised using terms like "buy" or "own" or "keep forever", since you are at best leasing it, and you don't really own it, it can be taken away at any time).
While their servers and so forth could be considered part of their infrastructure, that's clearly not the sort of thing that you were referring to at all. Plus simply adding additional servers in a building somewhere is no where near as costly or complicated as completely redoing the infrastructure of the wiring and so forth that delivers the content to people's homes.
But none the less, apparently they, as a business whose focus first and foremost is increasing profits while reducing costs, decided that it is not worth the cost to add those additional servers, and instead are removing older content to avoid taking on those costs.... probably (as Penguin Master has stated) because they aren't getting too many more sales on that content and it's just sitting there on their servers (and it probably isn't getting watched nearly as much as newer content, but that's just the nature of the beat. Of course in the short term newer content is going to get more overall views and make more money than older content... it doesn't mean that the older content should be removed, or that the newer content should later be removed when it becomes "old" and is no longer generating huge sales).
This is exactly the sort of thing that people like PenguinMaster and I have been talking about. Even when and if the delivery infrastructure in the US, UK, and anywhere else is properly updated and modernized, it doesn't mean that it will be the end of companies trying to save money and cut corners in manners such as this, especially since new TV and movie content is
constantly being created and released, making server space an ongoing issue even after all other aspects of the infrastructure are hypothetically updated properly in a manner that will last for a long, long time before they "need" to be updated again.
Your reply here really made no sense in relation to the topic at hand, and you went off on a fundamentally unrelated tangent (hence my previous "nice story, grandpa" response). That would be like someone complaining that their electrical bill keeps going up despite them making efforts to use less electricity, and you saying that things would be better if the mail service was faster and delivered the bill more quickly (and I know a lot of people do these things electronically these days without physical paper bills, but I'm just using this as an example for comparison). Even if the mail service speed were to substantially increase, it would have no impact on the rate that the customer is being charged by the electric company.
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