If your Netflix streams have stuttered in the past, you’ve likely blamed your ISP—but now, Comcast claims that Netflix has slowed down its own video streams. In a blog post, a Comcast’s Jennifer Khoury writes that Netflix knowingly sabotaged its own streams prior to inking a deal with Comcast earlier this year. She says: “As at least one independent commentator has pointed out, it was not Comcast that was creating viewability issues for Netflix customers, it was Netflix’s commercial transit decisions that created these issues.”
A couple days after Netflix and Comcast fought in public, the two companies, who are supposed to be partners, are at it again. Three days after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings publicly opposed Comcast’s planned acquisition of/merger with Time Warner Cable, one of his lieutenants has done the same thing: Ken Florance, the company’s vice president of content delivery, published a blog post complaining about the way Comcast treated its streams before Netflix agreed to a commercial deal in February. And not surprisingly, Comcast* has responded with its own blog post, accusing Netflix of being less than honest about its motives. Normally at this point we would note that all this makes for entertaining blog reading, and leave it that. But Comcast has upped the ante, by accusing Netflix of something extraordinary: The cable company says the video company sabotaged its own streams prior to the transit deal the two companies reached earlier this year.