If you have known the frustration of a buffering movie, you know something else, too: Netflix's terribleness, and Netflix's awesomeness, are pretty much directly correlated to the speed of your Internet connection.
Netflix, of course, knows this, too. Which is perhaps why, starting today, the movie service will begin releasing a monthly ranking of Internet service providers, celebrating the quick ones and shaming the slow. "Our 30 million members view over 1 billion hours of Netflix per month," Ken Florance, VP of Content Delivery, put it in a blog post today, "so we have very reliable data for consumers to compare ISPs in terms of real world performance."
So ... by all means, why not publicize them?
Below are Netflix's stats for November, with Google Fiber emerging as the clear winner. It's a helpful list, but it's also a nice -- if slightly passive-aggressive -- reminder that, as the digital ecosystem becomes ever more systemic, the quality of our Internet connections, and the quality of the services built on top of them, will be ever more reliant on each other.
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