I would be so cheesed with Comcast if I were Netflix

Comcast has done a modem swap, line tests, and a battery of back-end diagnostics of my internet connection. Last blog I posted got me a flurry of emails and phone calls from people who wanted to help from Comcast.

From what they've been able to find, nothing's wrong.

However, the fastest commercially available speed package that Comcast offers (19mbps) cannot deliver Netflix's Instant Watching Service in HD. There are real problems with that.

• The signal downgrade kicks in after a few minutes of relative high quality, so the viewer is subjected to a real tease of good quality before you're thrown back to youtube circa 2005.
• The video has to go to the red Netflix buffer screen, interrupting viewing.
• Netflix's Instant Watching library is pretty poor. I'm not going to go out of my way to watch something in crappy quality that I only wanted to marginally watch in the first place.
• All of the stuff you really want to watch is available on torrents. It was awesome to watch Torchwood's Children of the Earth each day last week a few hours after it was broadcast.
• Netflix's queue interface on those set top boxes require you to go to a computer and add or remove from the queue.

Half of the annoyance is with Netflix for its Watch Instantly implementation, half of my annoyance is with the movie rights distribution networks that forced Netflix into their current predicament of bad user experience and the other half of my annoyance is with Comcast's continued inability to explain why this is happening.

/vent