Apple Reportedly In Talks With Comcast For Separate Apple Streaming Path

An anonymous reader writes "Apple is reportedly in talks with Comcast to obtain a network pathway dedicated to live and on-demand programming for subscribers of unspecified Apple services. In other words, Apple traffic would be separated from the rest of the public's internet traffic. This deal is different from the one Netflix made with Comcast in that Apple is reportedly asking for separate traffic in the path from Comcast facilities to consumer homes; the Netflix deal only gains Netflix direct access to the Comcast network. While net neutrality rules no longer restrict ISPs from monetizing their traffic prioritization, Comcast is still bound in that respect until 2018 as part of the conditions for its acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011."

Re:Rent-seeking?

[MightyYar]

Apple has nothing even approaching a monopoly in any of their markets. Perhaps in dedicated MP3 players, if anyone still cares about that market... I think they had something like 70% of that at one time.

Comcast is a terrible company, and I wish them luck trying to sell pieces of their Comcrapstic pipe. So long as it doesn't affect my internet service, I don't really care what they fill it with. Right now it is filled with useless (to me) channels.

Re: Rent-seeking?

[Karlt1]

If not it would look like monopoly abuse, using their dominant position to cut margins to levels others couldn't sustain and paying for exclusive access to customers.

Response 1: What monopoly?
Response 2: You mean how Google uses it's monopoly on search to fund Android and give it away for free - reducing the margin to 0?

Re:S C U M B A G S

[kaiser423]

I currently access the Play Store on a forked Android derivative. There's nothing to keep me from doing so and Google makes no effort to keep me from doing so. But if you're a company and you want to ship the Google Play Store on your devices by default, Google does require some dollars and deals to ensure that your device is supported and to handle the development and bug squashing associated with supporting that device, etc. Basically, a company can't just install all of Google's apps and act like it's a supported configuration without it actually being supported....Seems reasonable to me.