I hate it. Hate hate hate it.

Not the concept, exactly, but the implementation leaves much to be desired.

Here is the deal. We live in one of the most densely populated areas in the country. And yet it doesn’t matter: broadband here is just as much of a near monopoly as it is elsewhere. The choice is cable (Comcast), which has hidden quotas and throttles connections randomly if it doesn’t like your downloading patterns, or DSL, which is never as fast as advertised and is administered by a company of imbeciles that thought it could quadruple in size with no problem and is now on the verge of bankruptcy and is being investigated by three states. Fiber is available in other parts of town, but not ours. Satellite wi-fi is a joke.

So the lesser of two evils is the DSL (we really hate Comcast). But it’s spluttery and slow. Stream? Ha ha ha. And here’s where the problem comes in. On some sites, such as YouTube, I can start the video, pause it, and then let the buffer fill with the entire video, allowing me to watch it all without stutters and pauses every one second. On most sites, this does not happen; the amount allowed to be buffered is so miniscule that the video is thus rendered completely unwatchable.

Now, I can see the logic: they don’t want people caching the whole file and then saving it. Except, psst, video people? I don’t WANT your crappy lo-res flash files. I want to watch them and then move on. But you make that impossible for me! So I have to go and find a place where I can download it instead, often in HD archival quality.