Neil Hunt of Netflix notes that the company is not throttling service and instead chalks up previous claims of throttling to ISP failures rather than anything in the Netflix servers. Whew.
As you’ll recall, the an over-enthusiastic blogger followed Netflix packets down to their source and found that his XBox 360 connection was considerably faster than his PC connection. Netflix explains that there is no discrimination:
Accordingly, customers may see better performance on Xbox than their PC, or vice-versa. Equivalently, some titles may stream unaffected, while others suffer congestion. There is no purposeful discrimination between different clients – we want them all to perform very well.
So there you have it. No problem here, keep moving, nothing to see.
Throttling really only makes sense if you’re in a premium/freemium model. Netflix customers pay for the right to stream and so it’s fairly obvious that they wouldn’t putz it up by cutting off the fun… or would they?