[iTunes] ARUGH about podcast downloads

[Michael Prete]

On Jan 21, 2009, at 6:43 PM, Mark Johnson wrote:

> I live in a rural area and have 2 opitions dialup and Satellite. I  
> am sure
> that more than 1% of the national population live in rural areas.

The percentage of people who live in rural areas is not the issue here  
at all, but rather what percentage of people who are online  have time- 
restrictions on their download abilities.

I have observed that when people begin a sentence with "I am sure..."  
it turns out they are NOT sure in any normal sense of the words. They  
really mean "It certainly OUGHT to be so". But they usually have not  
checked the facts.

> I am paying for premium service and that gives me 500 mb per 24 hour  
> period. I hit this at least 3 times a week

I'm sorry to hear that, but it isn't relevant to the discussion here.  
The discussion centered around was Apple stupid for not offering a  
feature that many people would need. I stated that not many people  
needed the feature, less than 1% in US would need it.

Here is some hard data, from searching the web rather than just making  
stuff up:

 From  < http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/suggestions/total-us-broadband-subscribers-exceed-100m-end-2008 
 > , the following statements can be found:

		Total US broadband subscribers to exceed 100M by end of 2008

		According to OECD (Organisation for Economic and Co-Op Development),  
the total number broadband
		subscribers in the US as of June 2006 was about 56M. As of December  
2007, OECD reports that the total
		is about 70M. As we continue to see acceleration of broadband access  
adoption, the number will only grow.

		This is a prediction that the total number of broadband subscribers  
in the US will exceed 100M by end of 2008.
		Judgement will be made when OECD releases the 2008 report.

Now, how many subscribers to satellite broadband in the US? To find  
out, I went here:

<http://satellite.tmcnet.com/topics/satellite/articles/33624-satellite-broadband-prospects.htm 
 >

and found the following statistic:

		Assume 90 percent of the subscribers are in the U.S. market, meaning  
there are about 540,000 U.S. 		
		consumer broadband (satellite) subscribers.

The ratio of satellite subscribers (540,000) to total broadband  
subscribers (100,000,000) is therefore 0.5% of total.

So in spite of your allegation that "more than 1% of the national  
population lives in rural areas.", it turns out that only 1/2 of one  
percent of total number of US broadband subscribers have satellite.  
Even if ALL satellite companies capped downloads except during certain  
hours, (And we don't know if that's true, some may not do so) my  
statement that "Less than 1% of US subscribers would need such a  
feature on iTunes as a result of their Satellite subscription  
policies" would seem to be correct.


------------
Michael Prete

More will be revealed.