When Bruno Leenders takes the 50-minute train ride to Amsterdam, he likes to stream blues and funk music through his smartphone. At home, Mr. Leenders, a Dutch technology consultant, watches Steven Seagal action movies on Netflix. Between meetings, he dashes off a few emails.
Mr. Leenders’s digital life has not changed all that much in the two years since the Netherlands started demanding that Internet providers treat all traffic equally, the same sort of rules that the United States adopted on Thursday.
His bill has gone up just marginally. He surfs, streams and downloads at the same speed — if not a little faster given the upgrades to Netherlands’ network, already one of the world’s best.
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Outside an Apple store in the Netherlands. Two years ago the country mandated that Internet providers treat all traffic equally.Credit Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg News, via Getty Images
You’re probably already thinking that the merger of the two biggest cable companies in the United States isn’t going to turn out great for regular people.
Guess what? You’re on to something. If Comcast’s proposed $45.2 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable actually happens (and that’s a big if), then the giant company would have 30 million customers and dominate cable and Internet service throughout the U.S.
Google took the consumer electronics world in July by storm with the announcement of the Google Chromecast HDMI Streaming Media Player, a digital media dongle available at the unbelievably low price point of $35.
The arrival of the Chromecast was a big surprise for several reasons. I keep on top of all the tech rumor sites every day, and I hadn’t heard so much as a rumor that Google was working on a media dongle, much less one for $35. There’s also Google’s very checkered record when it comes to hardware releases, which included the “Nexus Q,” another media streaming device introduced in the summer of 2012 that was ultimately cancelled before release.
But the Chromecast was something different: A super-cheap streaming solution, controllable from a smartphone or tablet, and a product that was released the day it was announced. In addition, it offered “browser-casting” from the Google Chrome browser on a computer. That, and the low price point, led to the Chromecast’s instant popularity.
Netflix is going all out with the Friday premiere of its second original series, House of Cards. The pay streaming service is offering special incentives to existing and potential viewers to watch a show packed with A-list creative talent. House of Cards’ makes it clear that Netflix wants to play on the same content stage as traditional cable channels.
Netflix on Friday made the premiere episode of House of Cards, its in-house political drama, available free for one month to the public with no membership requirement.
It is also offering subscribers the entire 13 episodes of the first season at one time instead of parceling out each episode weekly.
Here at its mysterious, last-minute press event in Los Angeles, Microsoft just confirmed it will sell its own Microsoft-branded Windows 8 RT tablet under the Surface badge. Measuring just 9.3mm thick, the Surface for Windows RT is built around an angled, all-magnesium VaporMg case that weighs just under 1.3 pounds, with an NVIDIA-made ARM chip powering the whole affair. .
