To Apple Computer, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, HBO, CBS, ABC, FOX, NBC, Archive.org and Time Warner Cable:

As many of you may know, Time Warner Cable has decided to charge their subscribers in certain areas based on their usage; therefore, I am writing this letter to inform you all that I will have to reduce my participation with all of your services.

As a user of iTunes I will no longer be buying as much music, TV shows, and movies. I have recently finished watching Dexter and Seasons 1&2 of Deadwood that I had purchased from iTunes. I do not know if I will purchase any other series from HBO or Showtime. It seems unreasonable to me that I would have to pay a potential download fee along with the purchase price for this content.

Netflix has been a wonderful service. I would like to take this opportunity to tell you that I will not be watching your on demand content and will return to DVD based mail delivered movies and TV shows.

To the major broadcast networks, CBS, ABC, FOX, NBC, and Hulu: I will not be keeping up with my favorites shows such as Lost, Heroes, Fringe, and Hell's Kitchen to name a few. Please tell your advertisers that I am sorry as well.

I would also like to take this opportunity to let the users of archive.org know that I will also have to limit my contributions to the archive.org open source library. After doing a cursory inventory of the content I have produced for archive.org. I have uploaded the majority of movie serials to the features film archive, hundreds of public domain feature films, and several rare pieces of African American cinema, tranlating into nearly 1.5 million individual downloads.

Finally, I would like to put forth a few questions to Time Warner Cable. I live in Greensboro, North Carolina, where you are introducing a pricing plan based on internet bandwidth usage* - an area where you have a monopoly as a cable provider. Is this a coincidence? I think not. Second, when data is passed from server to client, packet data is lost. How do you intend to accurately measure the amount lost during these transfers versus the amount received in order to accurately charge the customer? Because you are a monopoly in this area, I must rely on your services; however, if and when a viable alternative emerges, you will assuredly lose me, as well as many of my friends and colleagues, as your customer base. Thank you for your time, and I trust you will consider the inevitable consequences of this action.

A concerned customer,
Scott Saunders
scottsaunders@me.com


*excerpt taken from Business Week 03/21/09
In the case of Time Warner Cable, customers will be charged from $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan's cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. A download of a high-definition movie typically eats up about 8 GB. A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that's just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing. "To put it mildly," says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, "the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior."