Is Your ISP Blocking File Sharing TV Sites?
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You’ve done your research, you’ve checked out a stack of free online TV sites and narrowed your choices down to the one that you know has the best channels and a superior application. So you go and download the viewer software making sure that you carefully follow the installation instructions to the letter. You even go as far to temporarily disable both your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs because you trust the online TV provider. To your amazement everything goes through without a hitch!
You can feel the excitement as you configure your account and set the options in TV viewer. Next you select a channel to view, wait for the stream to buffer, but you get a message that says “sorry, this channel is not currently available”. Oh well, you figure it’s just a temporary thing with that one channel so you quickly try another one, but same deal. Now you’re starting to get a little worried and a tad bit frustrated as you try channel after channel only to receive the same annoying message that the channel is not available.
Unfortunately, this scenario plays out on a regular basis across the Internet. Thousands of frustrated users are finding out that their ISP is either completely blocking or severely throttling back the bandwidth of file sharing applications such as BitTorrent as well as many of the online TV sites.
What’s playing out is a battle between major ISPs on one side and Internet users and file sharing sites on the other. The battle is over “Net Neutrality” and copyright laws.
In November of 2007 a Comcast customer filed suit in California alleging that Comcast was impeding his ability to use file sharing sites. Comcast denied the allegation, but did admit that they do sometimes limit the bandwidth allocated to file sharing sites during peak usage periods.
However, independent testing has shown that Comcast takes these restrictions further than they have publicly admitted. The irony in all this is that ISPs like Comcast offer premium broadband services with download speeds approaching 12Mbps. This often entices users of file sharing services to shell out the extra monthly fees just so they can take advantage of the higher speeds.
Of course, these same users are rather upset once they discover it didn’t make any difference is actual download times.
The bottom line is that you should spend some time researching ISPs and their policies regarding peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Even if they don’t explicitly state that they limit access to such services, you need to take the extra step and do some digging before committing to a long term contract with an ISP.