Comcast Limits Downloads for Subscribers

By Jim on September 10th, 2008

Comcast finally dropped the truth on its cable TV and Internet customers and now there will be a 250GB limit for all Comcast subscribers.

As reprehensible as this decision is, it should come as no surprise to ET’s readers. I talked about it in another column back in May. We all knew Comcast was considering doing this and—they finally did.

But boy is Comcast in for a rude awakening! This was one of the stupidest decisions that they could have made and it will come back to haunt them in the years ahead.

Let’s cut to the chase on what this really is about. It has absolutely nothing to do with piracy and it has nothing to do with “managing” users. Comcast claims that most users don’t hit anywhere near 250GB per month. If that’s the case then why put everybody on that limit? Why try to use that as some arbitrary bandwidth barrier?

Comcast is going after Apple TV, Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace, and every other online distributor of content. Comcast does not want its customers to get into the habit of buying movies, TV shows, music, and other content products from Apple, Microsoft or other companies. They see those products as a direct threat to their cable TV/Pay Per View business and they are desperately trying to kill the development of the downloadable content market before it has a chance to grow into a real threat.

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