Following up on yesterday’s post about retransmission consent negotiations between Time Warner Cable and broadcaster LIN TV, there are a few additional details.

Some blogs had interesting reactions, such as CrunchGear and VideoNuze.  Since I’m not a sports fan, I neglected to note that this past weekend’s football games focused a spotlight on this issue.  According to Multichannel News, Time Warner and LIN continued their talks yesterday. A Bloomberg story from Friday adds some nuance about the financial issues lying behind the negotiations.

Viewers of a LIN station in New York, WIVB Buffalo, got upset when they noticed some critical comments were being deleted on an online forum.  For example:

• A viewer in Lewiston: “I thought these forums were for discussion, complaints, compliments, etc? Why is it every time I come to this forum, the posts about the TW?CHANNEL4 are deleted/removed? Whats up with that???”
• A viewer in Tonawanda: “I came here to topix on my lunch hour to find that there are all of the sudden NO posts about your fight with time warner since SATURDAY!?!?!?!?  Considering that there were about 40 topics here last night, I find it interesting that people who claim to be “connected” would resort to such censorship.”

And so on and so on…

Speaking of online forums, Jeff Simmermon, Director of Digital Communications for Time Warner Cable, did an interview with the blog Austinist about the situation with KXAN, the LIN station in Austin, TX. In addition, Simmermon and KXAN knocked gloves on Twitter. Here are some excerpts:

whitneyredman: @KXAN_News KXAN and LIN TV is freaking laaaame.
JeffTWC: @whitneyredman — I know the feeling, Whitney. I can’t decide this any more than KXAN can … it’s all up to LIN TV.
whitneyredman: @jeffTWC Does LIN TV have a Twitter?
JeffTWC: @whitneyredman — no, they’re just a poor little media conglomerate with a couple TV stations to limp by on …
KXAN_News: @JeffTWC It’s not ALL up to LIN, Jeff. Check out the facts at http://blogs.kxan.com/kxantimewarner
JeffTWC: @KXAN_News — if “less than a penny per day per subscriber” is such a piddly sum, why are you guys making such a stink?
KXAN_News: @jeffTWC I guess we could ask you the same thing…up there in your big tower in NYC.
JeffTWC: @KXAN_News — everyone knows I’m promoting my business’s best interests here. You’re doing the same thing and calling it journalism.
JeffTWC: @KXAN_News — I think the real question here is: which of us is rubber, and which of us is glue?

Time Warner also launched a website on the issue: The Truth Hurts KXAN! I mentioned that Time Warner produced a video explaining how subscribers can find some content from LIN stations online for free. The video (which you can see embedded below) also explains how to connect your computer to your television in order to watch that programming on TV.

UPDATE: In Green Bay, Time Warner has the website Tell the Truth WLUK!

If you live in one of certain key markets – such as Green Bay, WI; Buffalo, NY; Indianapolis, IN; Dayton, OH; Austin, TX; Toledo, OH; Springfield, MA; Fort Wayne, IN; Mobile, AL; Terra Haute, IN; or Columbus, OH – you may have a keener interest in the issue of retransmission consent than other readers of this blog.

The basics: Cable operators and other Multichannel Video Programming Distributors can’t retransmit broadcast signals (such as NBC, ABC, CBS, or Fox) without first obtaining the broadcaster’s consent.

TV station group LIN TV and Time Warner Cable have been in negotiations, but haven’t reached an agreement. At midnight last Friday morning when the existing carriage deal expired, LIN pulled the signals of 15 stations in 11 markets from Time Warner systems, which affects about 2.7 million of their subscribers.

While negotiations continued over the weekend, alternatives were promoted. LIN suggested Time Warner customers could switch to such competitors as Dish Network or FiOS TV. Time Warner has given away around 50,000 antennas to allow over-the-air reception of those broadcast signals and has also produced an online video that shows people how they can watch some broadcast programming over the Internet for free.

If you missed NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow on C-SPAN’s The Communicators Saturday night, you can now watch the episode online (or catch the repeat tonight on C-SPAN 2 at 8:00 p.m. ET). One of the first questions he addressed was the issue of retransmission consent. NCTA has expressed concern that a number of carriage deals are set to expire at the end of this year, about six weeks before the Digital Television Transition occurs on February 17. There is potential for consumer confusion and disruption with these deals being renegotiated during this period.

While the NAB has volunteered a four-week quiet period surrounding the DTV transition date – two weeks before Feb. 17 and two weeks after – McSlarrow has proposed that a slightly longer quiet period would be beneficial for consumers, while hardly tipping the balance of power in retrans negotiations.

As Time Warner cable this week begins their trial of tiered Internet pricing in Beaumont Texas, the blogs are aflutter over the various caps Time Warner has proposed.  Time Warner’s plans start with caps at 5 gigabytes and go up to 40 gigabytes. Going over the cap will cost $1 per gigabyte.  Time Warner is also bringing transparency to usage by giving customers a gauge that will allow them to monitor their bandwidth consumption the way cell providers allow you to track your minutes.

Despite all this complaints about Time Warner’s trial and claims its caps are way too low have been ringing around the Internet.

Exactly how much bandwidth do you consume?  It’s hard to say as the number various from user to user.  However, Plus.net put together a nice little graphic showing you what a single Gigabyte gives you - including 4 hours per day of web browsing, 10 song downloads per week, e-mail, Internet radio usage, etc.

What does all that equal?  Well, NCTA member BendBroadband operated with a tiered structure and found that 91% of their customers consumed less than 10GB per month.  BendBroadband found that 99.5% of their users consume less than 100GB per month and now uses that as their cap.

Somewhere above the 91% consuming 10GB per month, and the .5% consuming more than 100GB lies the heaviest Internet users.  Estimates in various studies suggest that 5-10% of Internet users consume half or more of all bandwidth.  Much of that traffic – though specific estimates vary greatly – consists of P2P (peer to peer) connections exchanging files.   A study by SafeNet, Inc. suggests the overwhelming majority of P2P traffic may also be illegal content:

But 90 percent of P2P downloads are still of illegally copied content, according to David Hahn, vice president of product management at SafeNet Inc., which tracks the networks.

Hahn said 12 million to 15 million people are file-sharing across the world at any one time, mainly on the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. The attraction of file-sharing is not just that it’s free – there’s also content available that can’t be had by legal means, like TV shows that haven’t aired in Europe.

Absent an exact figure of P2P usage, and whether or not you accept SafeNet’s 90% estimate, one thing is undeniable – a small percentage of Internet users are placing a burden on other users.  That is one reason a number of P2P applications providers are working to identify ways to make P2P a better and more efficient means of distributing content.  We believe that is a worthwhile pursuit, which is why NCTA and various cable companies are participating in a “P2P Best Practices” effort led by the Distributed Computing Industry Association.

In many of the articles written about the Time Warner experiment, detractors point to the number of movies than can be downloaded as a specific reason the cap is too low.  An average movie downloaded legally from iTunes is around 1-1.5 GB.  A 40GB cap would allow you to download more than 30 movies per month (or one a day) if that’s all you did.  Most people, however, don’t consume one movie per day, let alone 30 per month.

Mark Cuban, one of the founders of Broadcast.com and a web pioneer, points out the folly of this argument in a post on his blog yesterday.

Its been amusing to read all the blog posts with the math telling all of us just how many standard def or high def movies tiered subscribers will be limited to. You can have 2 or 3 of your favorite SD TV shows per day, or X number of HD movies per month. Say what? 

I have news for all of you that want to dedicate their internet connections to downloading movies. There is a new and exciting development. Its called an Application Specific Integrated Video Service (ASIVS). What is an ASIVS ? Its a computer dedicated specifically to downloading and playing both standard definition and high definition video. You connect it to a network that is dedicated to delivering GIGABITS PER SECOND of high quality video with ZERO buffering. It’s amazing, it always works and connects right to your standard def or High Definition TV, easily. Most of the systems I have seen have a pretty good programming guide and scheduling system and they will let you download AS MUCH VIDEO AS YOU WANT, limited only by the size of its hard drive!!

If you haven’t heard of the ASIVS, its because most people call it a DVR.

If downloading TV shows is so important to you, add a DVR to your cable or satellite service for 5 bucks a month and download all you want. If you want to watch those shows on your laptop, connect the composite video out in your DVR to the composite in on your laptop. Same with movies.

Can’t download movies illegally, tough.

The internet is a great resource for unlimited quantities of video. Downloading video is an internet given right. Using the internet to fill up your PC turned DVR at the expense of the performance of every user around you is not.

Mark’s right on the money with this.  Using the Internet to download video is your right and prerogative.   Using your Internet connection to consume all the available bandwidth and degrade your neighbor’s Internet experience simply isn’t.

As for Time Warner’s caps, are they too low?  Time Warner will soon find out.  They have described this as a test and will determine whether the model works and whether the caps are sufficient.  Unlike many of their critics online, Time Warner is unwilling to pronounce something a failure before even giving it a chance to prove itself.