when will all this madness stop? AT&T moves to restrict video freedom on cell phones

This is getting ^#@!&* stupid. When will all the madness end. In this country(US) we have broadband speeds that are lagging compared to some European countries, and especially Asian countries like South Korea and Japan. They are getting broadband speeds many times faster than the average US customer.

Now all these companies are starting to limit what we get on our measly little pipeline and controlling what we can watch. A few cable companies already have bandwidth caps to keep the “hogs” from stealing the little bandwidth that they are feeding us.

AT&T has taken steps to severely limit the kinds of video applications that be used with its cellular data network, reports note. Terms of service for AT&T Wireless have been changed to block “downloading movies using P2P file sharing services, customer initiated redirection of television or other video or audio signals via any technology from a fixed location to a mobile device, web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition devices.”

The difficulty is that such terms may not only restrict the likes of BitTorrent clients, but also mainstream video applications, such as CBS’ TV.com app for the iPhone. The wording of the terms also appear to be directly targeted at Sling Media’s SlingPlayer app, which relays broadcasts from a person’s TV and also enables control of DVR functions. The app is currently available for several phone platforms, such as BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, though not the iPhone.

Also new in the terms of service agreement is the phrasing used for overage charges, which now amount to $0.00048 per kilobit for subscribers on the carrier’s 5GB DataConnect plan. With the 200MB DataConnect option, overage forces customers to pay $10 for an extra 100MB. Unused data cannot be transferred from month to month.

Update on Friday, April 3, 2009 at 9:31PM by Jon Arnason

Maybe this is a small victory…for now.

AT&T tonight has quickly backtracked on its controversial new terms of service for cellphones that would ban video on 3G and the rest of its cellular network. In a statement delivered to Electronista, the company claims that the posting was made “in error” and that it has since been removed in favor of an earlier agreement. No mention was made as to whether any of the terms were likely to return in the future.

While the motivation behind the quick retraction is unclear, the policies had already triggered a hostile reaction from critics. The new agreement was ostensibly made to bar illegal video streams over peer-to-peer or to rebroadcast a live feed of commercial TV, but its wording would have effectively banned the use of Slingbox media hubs used to view a customer’s own TV and would theoretically have barred viewing legal video sites using fixed sources, like Hulu or TV.com.

Video is already partly regulated on the network, as devices like the iPhone are often required to stream certain video services on Wi-Fi or else to reduce the bitrate.