[ NNSquad ] Re: ISP's resetting RealPlayer?

[Edward Almasy <ealmasy@scout.wisc.edu>]

On Jan 11, 2008, at 2:52 PM, Brett Glass wrote:
> On the other hand, many ISPs do limit the durations of sessions.  
> People often leave streaming media on and then go home -- for the  
> evening or even for days at a time. If large numbers of people do  
> this (and as an ISP I can tell you from our statistics that it's  
> quite common), it can consume excessive resources. It doesn't help  
> that streaming audio consists of lots of small packets, maximizing  
> network overhead and causing congestion. Having the user click  
> again to keep listening after 5 hours is perfectly reasonable.

I'd like to note that tacitly limiting session duration like this is  
a huge and ongoing headache for those of us who time-shift internet  
radio broadcasts, to listen to them later or offline (e.g. on an  
iPod).  I listen to a couple of "live" BBC radio shows over the 'net  
in this fashion because they're on at very inconvenient times, and  
when my audio recording application unexpectedly drops the connection  
it usually means that I miss the rest of the show.

(Yes, I realize that the 'net isn't meant to provide a guaranteed  
transport mechanism, but my ISP deciding to arbitrarily cut a  
connection because forcing me to "click again to keep listening after  
X hours is perfectly reasonable" would be IMHO obnoxious,  
presumptuous, and just plain wrong.)

Ed