Thursday, December 13, 2012

Hollywood Behind Slow Internet in U.S.?

I'm throwing this out there as a conspiracy theory on a bit of a whim, but I do have a reason.  Here in Japan our Internet speeds are much, much faster.  Due to this extreme speed I am able to easily stream all of my favorite shows (Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead to name a few) that I normally wouldn't be able to watch here.  A quick Google search of "show/movie title" followed by the word "streaming" will reveal a plethora of sites.

Us Singularity watchers see the progression to free streaming everything as being inevitable.  As big date becomes cheaper and household download speeds get faster, it's no wonder that a once spotty practice of watching TV streaming online (with all the lag time and failed links) has, in Japan, become nearly as trustworthy as my Internet connection itself.  If one works, so does the other.  Not to mention, with faster speeds comes the ability to watch these streams in higher quality.

Therefore, it doesn't surprise me that the U.S., the largest TV and movie watching market in the world, is lagging behind most of Europe and East Asia when it comes to Internet speeds.  The crawling browser dinosaurs that still exist in the States are about to be hit with an asteroid known as truly high-speed Internet.  With the Kindle Fire HDs that we can plug directly into our TV sets with merely an HDMI cable will allow us to put these streams onto our TVs making the need to pay for TV start to seem irrelevant, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Hollywood supports the crawl.  Thank our lucky stars that Google Fiber might very well turn this thing into a real race yet again.

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