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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: Are you gonna sign up for Disney's new streaming service?
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Harold Hallikainen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 906
From: Denver, CO, USA
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 09-04-2018 12:11 PM
We have a small DVD collection and a larger CD collection. It's very rare for us to play one of these. The convenience of streaming is just too great.
Bandwidth and streaming quality continues to improve. I read that Blu Ray can have up to 128 GB using four layers. If this 128 GB is used for a two hour movie, it would be about 142 Mbps. That's available to many Internet users now, and will be available to more in the future (server capacity has to be pretty high to handle a lot of users - I like the Bit Torrent technique for spreading server load).
I think the main problem with streaming is the content licensing. Content comes and goes. It is not available reliably on any one service, so you subscribe to several, and even there, there's no guarantee the content is available. As mentioned before, I think the ultimate solution is for the content owner to host the content and allow users to play it by paying for the individual playout. You'd use Google to find the movie, then pay a buck or two to watch the movie. Users should have access to all content all the time, not just what some packager (such as Netflix) has chosen to license at this particular point in time.
Harold
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-04-2018 12:35 PM
quote: Harold Hallikainen
I think the ultimate solution is for the content owner to host the content and allow users to play it by paying for the individual playout. You'd use Google to find the movie, then pay a buck or two to watch the movie. Users should have access to all content all the time, not just what some packager (such as Netflix) has chosen to license at this particular point in time.
The problem with that, though, is what if you want to watch a movie in parts? There's been times I would have "rented" a movie from Amazon, but they only give you 48 hours to finish it once you start. That's a load-a-crap to me -- you should be able to pay for it and have until forever to finish watching it.
When somebody puts that kind of deal together and can make the content owners cooperate, that'd be a slam dunk. But they need that steady subscription income, so it'll probably never happen.
What about a low subscription price in addition to a pay-as-you-go option for the content? Maybe something like $5 a month for "membership," and then the movie rentals on top of that. It's the same thing Amazon is doing right now with Prime, except for that pesky 48-hour thing.
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Harold Hallikainen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 906
From: Denver, CO, USA
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 09-04-2018 01:40 PM
Good point! I think they MIGHT do the window so they don't have to do a playout count. The time window lets you go back (including to the beginning) to catch what you missed. Perhaps the playout window should be larger. My point, though, is that I don't think the content should be based on a subscription to a particular studio or other content distributor (including Netflix) where the content can come and go, but should be available to everyone with no monthly charge but with a per play (or, perhaps with a one week window) payment. This would be similar to Red Box where you don't have to subscribe, you just pay when you use it. I don't have to subscribe to Red Box and every video store in the area (recognizing there are few), but, instead, I just pay to get the content for a limited time. With streaming, I can visit every video store without leaving my house.
The major advantages I see with Blu Ray over Netflix are image quality (though Netflix should be able to approach Blu Ray quality) and the fact that the content will not disappear. We are forever wanting to watch something we saw before on Netflix, but it's not there anymore. I don't know how Netflix licenses their content from the owners. IF it were done on a per play basis, it seems like there'd never be a reason for content to go away. I suspect, though, that there's some minimum payment to the content owner, so Netflix has to evaluate whether it's worth that minimum. Finally, content owners (like Disney) may not want to give Netflix a cut of the income, so they decide to stream directly. But, again, consumers end up paying a bunch of monthly fees instead of just paying for what they watch.
Sorry I'm repeating myself here. I'll try to avoid that!
Harold
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 09-04-2018 02:55 PM
quote: Mike Croaro
I've never streamed anything ! No plans to. I still buy all stuff on DVD.
I've always bought movies on physical media; I've yet to buy a virtual "digital HD" version of a movie to download or stream. I didn't even fart with the download coupons that often came with retail Blu-ray versions of movies.
With that being said, it has now been nearly 2 years since I have bought any movies on disc. And that was when Hastings Books Music & Video was doing its chain-wide liquidation fire sale. My movie disc buying habits had badly trailed off well before that fire sale.
For me personally I have two problems with buying movies these days.
Problem one: I don't have an infinite amount of space for all that crap. A large and growing collection of movie disc cases eats a pretty significant amount of living & storage space. Each disc purchase adds to the pile. Most of the DVDs I bought between the late 1990's to about 2008 are now in a couple storage bins in my 2nd bedroom (perhaps developing laser rot if I didn't know better). There's only enough space on the shelves in my living room for Blu-rays. I could probably free up space by selling off a good bit of the collection, but given the current environment I would get a fraction of the original purchase price. And that's for the Blu-ray quality stuff; the dated SD resolution DVDs would earn far less, if anything at all.
Problem two: far too few movies really, truly have repeat viewing potential. Even a lot of "good" movies fall into this category. I watched BlacKkKlansman this past weekend at the theater. It's an honestly good movie I recommend. It's not a sequel, remake or other derivative kind of movie easy to forget. But seeing the movie once was enough; I have no desire to watch it again, much less buy a copy of it on disc. Far too many times I've bought movies on disc only to watch them just a couple or so times before they started gathering dust on the shelves. A customer needs to watch a Blu-ray disc at least 4 to 6 times just to equal what it would have cost to rent it repeatedly at the video store. In the end a bunch of these disc purchases end up being wastes of money.
One thing that kind of disturbs me is how I'm starting to feel about some old favorites I've bought multiple times. I'll throw in a Blu-ray of something like Die Hard, The Matrix or Fight Club. At some point I'll either just stop the disc or let my attention drift to other things around the house rather than concentrating on the movie. Deep down, though I hate to admit it, I've seen many of those old favorites enough to get sick of them.
I have mixed feelings about streaming. The quality is definitely inferior to physical media. My cable Internet connection runs a steady, respectable 27 megabits per second. At that speed some movies and TV shows will show off 1080p quality comparable to a good Blu-ray. Other titles can look terrible. I think it all varies from one show to the next. I tried, but couldn't sit through a Netflix version of Jurassic Park. The video quality was terrible and the sound mix was wimpy as hell. I wonder if companies like Netflix and Amazon give more download bandwidth to certain titles than others.
Streaming is definitely more appealing to those who want (or are forced) to down-size and simplify certain aspects of their lives. Traditional cable/satellite TV is too damned expensive. It's a lot cheaper to get a TV antenna and subscribe to a couple of streaming services. You don't have to worry about the shows your watch (or buy) eating shelf space and turning into cheap yard sale fodder. If you move the lack of discs is just one less thing to pack.
quote: Sam Graham
Yeah, but my thinking is there's little need for evolution at this point. I think 4K Blu-ray is positioned to have a long maturity. Some of the catalog titles I've seen (I would highly recommend "Grease") are so jaw-dropping, it's hard to imagine they could possibly improve on them.
In principal I want the technology companies to keep pushing boundaries and improving quality levels, even if it's not so easy to tell the difference between a new quality standard and the previous standard. 8K (or even 4K) may seem like overkill to some, including a good number of technology critics. But is it necessary to clearly see each individual pixel on a TV monitor? Shouldn't TV technology strive to reach a point where an image at looks like a high quality photograph rather than something built on a visible grid of pixels? Shouldn't the technology have the capacity to deliver such a thing at close viewing distances or really big sizes? For me that's one of the things "digital" needs to do to be a worthwhile replacement for film. IMHO, the pixel grid of a TV set should ultimately be able to show film grain as film grain and not square bits of digital noise.
The entertainment industry isn't doing the technology any favors. If anything they're fighting a quiet war against it. There's still very little true 4K content (much less anything 8K). Movie and TV studios still hold to the cost cutting belief that 2K is good enough. They're perfectly willing to up-rez a 2K movie to "4K" and then sell it on UHD Blu-ray at a premium $7-$10 higher than 1080p Blu-ray. There's some great new 4K OLED TV sets out there. The prices are coming down to far more reasonable levels. Still the lack of native 4K content makes it a bad buy.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 09-05-2018 07:48 PM
Streaming will never approach or exceed the quality available on physical disc (on average of course, as there will always be isolated exceptions), simply because the pressures are always against quality.
A streaming service pays for its bandwidth and storage in form of service and capital expenses. An internet provider pays for its bandwidth and capacity in the same way. While we in the U.S. largely do not pay for usage, we do pay for levels of speed, and the day will probably come when caps and usage metering will be a thing. Under those circumstances, it's always in the best interest of those paying the bills to do it as cheaply as the market will bear. Constrain the bandwidth of movies being delivered as much as possible, just above the point where complaints happen or competitive pressures require (although not too many people are sitting there comparing the relative video quality of Netflix vs. Hulu vs. Vudu vs. Amazon, etc.).
According to the all-knowing and usually accurate Wikipedia, Blu-ray is capable of up to 54 Mbps. Ultra HD Blu-ray is 128 Mbps. My speedtest shows that I've got a 200 Mbps connection, but streaming an HD-quality show on Netflix is only 5.5 Mbps. The 4K stream of The Crown clocks in at 15.26 Mbps.
Is it pretty good? Yes. And perfectly fine for watching TV shows, channel surfing, and movies that you decide to watch on a whim. But no one should ever think that these services approach the video quality (much less audio quality) of their physical media equivalents. The artifacts are there, and not all that hard to see. Artifacts that would be completely unacceptable on physical media, and yet many seem to accept it as a tradeoff for the convenience of it all.
The problem with yet another streaming service is that it is yet another streaming service that wants a monthly fee with a subset of titles that overlaps with some of the other services but will always have some exclusive strangle-hold that makes it impossible to consolidate one's purchasing decisions to a reasonable level.
I have Amazon Prime and Netflix streaming, but I also am on the two-disc-at-a-time Netflix disc-by-mail service. When I want to watch a movie that's worth watching, I prefer to get it on physical disc. Buying a streaming video is not an option I'll consider except in the most unique circumstance, and renting a streaming video happens about 2-3 times per year because we want to watch something that isn't available in any other way (e.g. trying to watch a particular version of The Christmas Carol at 9:30pm over a holiday weekend).
For movies that I think I'll watch more than once, I don't mind paying $20-25 to get the 4K disc. I usually watch for sales and try to get them for $15 and build up a library of movies to see so I'm not beholden to last-minute availability choices.
I don't see a scenario where the Disney streaming service would take the place of either Amazon or Netflix at this point, and I have no interest in adding a third, at any (monthly) price. If they go the Vudu route of individual rentals, it wouldn't be a problem and I'd be happy to add it to the list of places I'd check when streaming is my best option.
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Mitchell Dvoskin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1869
From: West Milford, NJ, USA
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted 09-05-2018 09:36 PM
> My speedtest shows that I've got a 200 Mbps connection, but streaming an HD-quality show on Netflix is only 5.5 Mbps. The 4K stream of The Crown clocks in at 15.26 Mbps.
Just curious, what speedtest are you using? If you are not using fast.com or the fast.com app, you are not testing against actual Netflix content servers. While 5.5 Mbps is in theory is the minimum speed for HD, according to Netflix you need at least 25 Mbps for 4K.
I am paying for 100 Mbps, and getting very close to that when measuring with most general purpose speedtests, but when I use fast.com (or the ios app), I average around 44 Mbps from Netflix. If you are getting less, you should complain to your ISP, they are throttle your connection to Netflix.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 09-05-2018 11:10 PM
quote: Scott Jentsch
Streaming will never approach or exceed the quality available on physical disc (on average of course, as there will always be isolated exceptions), simply because the pressures are always against quality.
Never say never. Physical media has its own limitations, like disc data capacity and maximum bandwidth limits. The discs cost a good bit of money to author and replicate. It takes at least 7-10 years for a new generation of optical disc technology to move from stages of R&D to finished retail products on store shelves. Lately there's a lot fewer store shelves for those discs and disc players.
The long term prospects of optical disc technology does not look good. I'm not at all happy about saying that either. I still very much prefer buying music on CD rather than downloading lossy compressed song files. The UHD Blu-ray format is not exactly taking the world by storm. Is any company working on a next-generation "super duper" optical disc that can play 8K movies?
IP-based movie streaming is currently still clearly inferior to the video quality on optical discs. But that's due to the fact much of the US still has relatively slow Internet connection speeds. Streaming services like Netflix and their content providers encode video at bit rates that will work good enough for as many customers as possible, including people with crappy Internet connections.
Residential Internet service providers are under a great deal of pressure to increase download and upload speeds. Some of the pressure is coming from customers jealous of the new subdivision the next neighborhood over all wired up with fiber and pulling gigabit download speeds. But the real pressure is coming from the mobile phone space. Depending the location and service provider current 4G LTE tech can easily deliver top speeds to phones over 100 megabits per second. 5G technology is now emerging and has much higher top speeds. So, a residential ISP giving customers puny 3 megabit service and thinking that standard can last for years to come will risk losing customers. Just like cable TV companies are losing customers to "cord cutting," residential ISPs can fall victim to the same thing.
Anyway, average Internet connection speeds will continue to improve. As they do so will the quality of video encodes uploaded to streaming services. At some point the quality will overtake what is available on optical discs, especially if there isn't much (or any) future development of optical disc technology.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 09-07-2018 11:52 AM
quote:
Just curious, what speedtest are you using? If you are not using fast.com or the fast.com app, you are not testing against actual Netflix content servers. While 5.5 Mbps is in theory is the minimum speed for HD, according to Netflix you need at least 25 Mbps for 4K.
I checked both Speedtest.net and fast.com, and they were both within 10 Mbps of each other.
I just tried my experiment again, given that it is now the middle of the day (as opposed to the evening):
Fast.com: 210 Mbps
Netflix Stream (as reported by the info display within the Netflix app of my Sony TV)
1080 stream of The Crown: 5.53 Mbps
2160 stream of The Crown: 15.26 Mbps
2160 stream of Groundhog Day: 15.26 Mbps
quote: Bobby Henderson
IP-based movie streaming is currently still clearly inferior to the video quality on optical discs. But that's due to the fact much of the US still has relatively slow Internet connection speeds. Streaming services like Netflix and their content providers encode video at bit rates that will work good enough for as many customers as possible, including people with crappy Internet connections.
My stance remains that the audio and video quality of streaming services will never approach, match, or exceed that on physical disc, because the market pressures will always be to skimp on quality to save costs. Only competitive pressure would change that, and even with the relatively low-bandwidth music marketplace, high-resolution music is still a rarity in streaming services. I highly doubt that the streaming movie services will do any differently.
I have a 200 Mbps service from my internet provider, as confirmed by multiple speed tests through multiple servers (Netflix, as well as multiple servers available via speedtest.net). I have plenty of available bandwidth, but Netflix will not deliver a 4K feed that exceeds 16 Mbps, which is just a third of the max bandwidth possible with HD Blu-ray, and less than 12% of that possible on 4K UHD Blu-ray.
If we are in the final days of movies on physical media, I don't yet see it. Do I believe it is inevitable? Most likely. Until that day comes, however, I will continue to enjoy and champion the best way to watch movies, which is on physical disc, while still recognizing the convenience of streaming as an option. (But no one should make any mistake that it's the best quality possible)
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