Streaming Services Blocked

Streaming Services Blocked
At the end of the 2014-15 school year DIIT blocked streaming media sites including Pandora and Netflix for all of the NYCDOE including administrative buildings. We are not blocking YouTube unless a school specifically requests it.
Pandora and Netflix are being blocked because the NYCDOE has access to a fixed/shared amount of bandwidth for all buildings. What we have learned, unfortunately, is that streaming media sites like Netflix break our sharing model, taking up as much of the shared bandwidth as they can acquire. A few Netflix users across school buildings can take as much as 25% of our available bandwidth making the internet slow for all schools. Toward the end of the school year, internet slowness became such a problem that some schools were unable to complete required administrative work.
Since it’s not possible at this time to add more bandwidth to the shared amount, our only choice is to restrict some use. We made the change as an emergency because so many schools were impacted by the internet slowdown and could not complete critical work. Over the summer we made some changes to help alleviate internet slowness but unfortunately we won’t be able to return access to Netflix, etc. in the foreseeable future.
There are other sites – YouTube, TeacherTube and http://www.discovery.com that have free videos. Additionally, we are not blocking iTunes or Amazon because they are more manageable than Netflix.

http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/EnterpriseOperations/DIIT/default.htm