Time Warner Conspiracy theories being developed

When we wrote about the influence that bandwidth caps would have on ITunes and Amazon Unbox, we thought we were really pushing the envelope. The good part is that we are not the only ones thinking that there is something else going on here, and that the same kind of idea is coming from the Washington Post. Forget illegal downloading and file sharing, is the real reason that the bandwidth caps are all about reeling in ITunes?

Time Warner Cable, which also sells broadband via its Road Runner service, has chosen your city for a pricing experiment. If you have plans to sign up and watch lots of high-definition flicks using, say, the new iTunes digital rental program announced last month, start saving now, because Time Warner is going to tally up those gigabytes. You know that feeling that mobile phone users get when they exceed their allotted minutes and get a heart-stopping tariff for overage charges? Some Beaumont cinephiles could get the same infarction from their Road Runner bills. Source: Washington Post

Realistically, if you want to kill off digital delivery of media, this is going to be one way to do it. Sure, whine about bandwidth consumption; work on plans, raise prices, whatever the company needs to do to get more money to cover the use and consumption of new delivery methods. But if there really is collusion here, then folks that rely on Time Warner’s Road Runner network might be shooting themselves in the head rather than building out additional network bandwidth and raising prices.

There is a penalty for digital delivery, and that penalty is bandwidth consumption. As mom and pop get into downloading videos, renting from Amazon, ITunes, Netflix and everyone else, watching YouTube, downloading the video’s that the kids make of the grand kids, this isn’t about illegal downloading, it is all about getting people back into the store and buying DRM crippled media that may or may not work in the device you can afford.

Interesting if true, not surprising, but if you use Road Runner, it is time to shop around and see what else is available. Otherwise, you might get one of those major oh my god bills and have to talk to mom and dad about their “downloading habits”.