Is Netflix trying to embarrass certain ISPs?

From CNET News.com: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said it is "inappropriate" for Internet service providers to require his company to pay all the costs of delivering streaming video to a subscriber's home, and tomorrow he plans to do something about it.

In a letter from Hastings to Netflix shareholders published today, he said it is only fair for ISPs to accept some of the financial burden since it is the ISPs' customers who have requested Netflix's content. Hastings made it clear that he hasn't received enough cooperation from ISPs.

In response, Netflix plans to publish statistics about which ISPs are best at delivering "the best, most-consistent high speed Internet for streaming Netflix."

If you're an executive at Charter Communications, you've got nothing to worry about. The only early tidbit Hastings revealed about tomorrow's post is that Charter was the top-performing ISP. But for bandwidth providers further down on the list, the disclosure could prove embarrassing. How much do you want to bet that some of the poorer-performing ISPs are the ones giving Netflix the hardest time about streaming costs?

Hastings wrote: "We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs."

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