Streaming TV Services Seek to Sidestep Web Congestion

HBO, Showtime, and Sony are jumping into online television. But instead of putting their Web traffic on the public Internet’s main thoroughfare, they want to be in a separate lane that would ensure their content gets special treatment. Apparently, those companies have talked to major broadband providers such as Comcast about having their Web TV services treated as “managed” services. In effect, that would move them away from the congestion of the Internet, which they fear will only get worse as more people opt to stream movies and TV shows on the Web. The other benefit: a separate lane would be exempt from monthly data-usage thresholds operators enforce for public Internet traffic, saving customers from the surcharges that can kick in if they binge on too many episodes of “Game of Thrones” or “Homeland.”

Such arrangements would tap into a gray area of the debate over “net neutrality,” the principle that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally. The Federal Communications Commission’s recently approved net-neutrality rules, which go into effect in a few months, bar broadband providers from accepting payment from companies to favor their traffic. And the rules say the FCC “expressly reserves the authority to take action” if it finds that specialized services are “being used to evade the open Internet rules.” But the agency has maintained that cable and phone companies can offer certain specially managed services -- digital phone and video-on-demand, for example -- that run on a dedicated slice of bandwidth in the cable pipe that is separate from the portion reserved for public Internet access. Operators do that so that consumers don’t experience dropped calls or buffering of shows. Everything else a consumer does online, however -- shop on Amazon, search on Google, or stream TV shows and movies -- happens on the public Internet.