this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
2282 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
60078 readers
3279 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I still believe there's a huge markup though. Look at premium Usenet providers - they store something like 1200 days of the posts (minus DMCA takedowns) which I think run something like hundreds of petabytes of data. Yet they can provide the service, including transfer, for what has to be a niche market at rates around $10 a month. Presumably there's no "magic" or subsidies in what they're doing. Yet what they're doing is essentially what a big streaming service is doing.
Now you might say - well, yea, $10 a month - right around streaming prices. Sure, but you figure in the larger scale to spread the costs over. For Box etc, they're not even having the content costs that a Netflix would have (which I'll admit is a lot, and might well make up for the difference between just storage and transfer of Usenet) which makes them comparable in some sense.
Even if you say that well, Usenet gets multiple companies cooperating in their competition and storing the same data so they get some redundancy for "free", compare to backup providers like Backblaze at $7 a month for unlimited storage (unless you're on Linux, then f**k you, so I don't use them, but still). Or Jottacloud that runs around $100 a year for 5TB soft cap 10TB hard cap.
I still think there's a mix of a lot of markup, and people not actually looking much into competition - I know people who don't cross compare.