Canadian Broadband → VMedia fights mandatory channel carriage

You are over-simplifying it way to much in your endeavour to try and make NetFlix a comparable alternative to any TV subscription service.

Honestly it seems like you want VMedia to mold to what you believe they should be offering. While everyone's entitled to their opinion, no one's force feeding VMedia IPTV down your throat. They're aren't even available in Quebec yet, or a good chuck of Ontario (I tried my postal code, no service).

You don't think VMedia's offering a good value for what you pay? Good thing you're in Canada where you vote with your wallet. Don't subscribe to service. Let them know why you don't like it and maybe in the future they will look all the feedback in make changes.

But you seem to be on a crusade to crucify VMedia unjustifiably. So continue you're ranting, it seems as though no level of logic will get through to you.

Have a good night.

On demand? We're talking about broadcast television here, there's no on demand. You can't buffer. They don't even use the same network protocols. Netflix is offline VBR over TCP that can buffer as much as it likes, while IPTV is live multicast UDP that has to drop frames if there is any slowdowns/delayed packets/jitter (they also need to make it fault-tolerant because there WILL be data loss, so maybe even some error correction going on). The compression techniques used are very different, and while you can probably feed it into the same h.264 decoder at the end of the day, that's about the only thing they have in common.

Nothing wrong with using an antenna. I'm in the GTA and have been using one for several years now. As far as I'm concerned, the $3500.00 I've saved to date is far better off in my pocket than in Rogers. I was with them for thirty three years when I cancelled. I got tired of paying for stuff I never watch, and the constant price hikes. I get 28 channels, many in far better HD than the compressed versions the cable companies offer, and that's more than enough for me.

Yup, I realize there is antenna, but I am also a customer. If there's another option I am willing to pay for I can go for that too.

That being said, I have recently (a wee ago) checked what is actually available OTA in my area, and it's not much. To get anything decent I'd have to get into a pretty complicated setup and possible (expensive) to gain some signals that are weak in my area. The same thing with FTA, it has a huge cost in obtaining the hardware and installation (I mean real FTA here, not the grey market stuff).