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by QualmsAplenty 798 days ago
The shame is in comparing compressed-to-hell streaming versions to Blu-Ray in the first place, and commenting on how the Blu-Ray is "sharper." ANY Blu-Ray version should be much better than streaming.

The NYT isn't free. I don't respect such shoddy feature-writing.
1 comments
eru 798 days ago
> ANY Blu-Ray version should be much better than streaming.

That should change over time: Blu-Ray is a format released about 20 years ago, and our streaming bandwidth (and encoding algorithms) keep improving.

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account42 798 days ago
> our streaming bandwidth (and encoding algorithms) keep improving.

Streaming isn't limited by the available bandwidth but by the margins the streaming service doesn't want to spend on it.

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crazygringo 797 days ago
Exactly. Making a Blu-ray super high quality involves no additional marginal cost. The disc space is there to begin with, so might as well use it.

But every time a movie gets streamed, it costs the streamer twice as much if the file is twice as large. So streaming bandwidth will generally be minimized as much as possible to a "just barely good enough" quality level.

It's not about technology improving or how old Blu-rays are, it's about economics.

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eru 797 days ago
Duh, of course. But as bandwidth becomes more available (ie cheaper), it makes more sense for streaming services to stream in higher and higher quality.

Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.

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crazygringo 797 days ago
> Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.

I see no difference. Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago.

In fact, if you pay for YouTube Premium you can get a separate "1080p Premium" with a higher bitrate. But you have to pay. Their free version hasn't gotten better at all. In fact, it's gone the other direction -- they've gotten more agressive about defaulting to 720p or 480p streams when they used to show 1080p by default.

Sure, a tiny handful of videos have 4K versions available, but that's only for a tiny proportion of streams. And YouTube even removes higher resolutions after a video has been published a bit. Which is why you see lots of YouTube VR videos described as 8K but there's no 8K stream anymore. There was when it was uploaded, but YouTube removed it.

So, no. Even if bandwidth gets cheaper, streaming twice the bits is still twice as expensive. Streaming services aren't going to stream more bits -- they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer.

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eru 797 days ago
> Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago.

Oh, 1080p indeed been introduced in 2009, eg 15 years ago. I thought it was younger. However, just pretend I was talking about the next higher resolutions, or 60fps.

> [...] they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer.

Competition will take care of that extra profit.

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eru 797 days ago
Of course. But competition (and consumer demand) also means we are getting streams in more than 10 fps and more than 360p.

The cheaper bandwidth becomes, the more it makes sense for streaming services to give people what they want to pay for.

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