[crazygringo]

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.

[eru]

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.

[crazygringo]

> 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.

[eru]

> 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.

[crazygringo]

> Competition will take care of that extra profit.

No it won't. I said "minimally good enough". Competition takes care of things up to "minimally good enough". And then it stops.

That's my point -- bandwidth getting cheaper is not leading streamers to increase the quality of their 1080p. Because not enough people care. Not enough people will switch services. Competition ceases because it's not a significant factor of differentiation.

(For the niche people that do care, that's why YouTube premium exists, but it's niche.)

[eru]

> No it won't. I said "minimally good enough". Competition takes care of things up to "minimally good enough". And then it stops.

Huh, why would it stop? People can freely switch between streaming services.

> Because not enough people care.

Yes, competition improves what people care about. That's a good thing. You don't want society to waste resources on stuff people don't care about.

Btw, your argument might demonstrate that video quality won't go up, if people don't care. Yes, I agree. But what does that have to do with profit?

People always eg care about price; and they will switch for price.