said by silbaco:I have no problem believing Netflix is seeking preferential treatment. The terms for Sonic.net and Time warner are very possibly different. Time Warner is huge.
Of course Netflix is seeking preferential treatment. They want to make their service better, and are offering ISPs a way to cut down on their transport costs. They prefer to get treated better since it's a benefit to all with the exception ISPs won't be able to gripe and charge Netflix access to their subscribers.
It's Netflix service, and they can setup their policies as they want. If they want to setup their service so that there content that consumes the most amount of bandwidth must be closest to the consumers. It saves them money, saves the ISP money, and helps ensure that the consumer has as little issue as possible with bandwidth related issues.
Netflix isn't pushing out any other streaming services. They are free to do it if they want as well. And any ISP can sign up to the program if they have a connection to one of the interconnect sites or peering exchanges settlement-free. Or if they are a larger ISP (Netflix suggests more than 100k subscribers in an area) that they can have their own 4U appliance with 100TB of storage and a 10GB network card locally.