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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Are you gonna sign up for Disney's new streaming service?
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 09-07-2018 04:05 PM
quote: Scott Jentsch
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.
None of the content on physical media is "master grade" quality. Movies are all significantly data compressed to fit within storage capacity and bandwidth I/O limits. Some movie studios data compress their material worse than others. For instance I've seen plenty of puny bit rates on Warner Bros movie discs. WB is well known for that.
Regarding the music industry, it's a mess. In that market convenience and price are both stepping all over interest of quality. Sales of retail CDs is in the toilet. Some of that is via the big downturn in brick and mortar retail. Lately the continued downturn is being fueled by half a dozen or more music streaming services (Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Google Music, Amazon Prime, Sirius|XM, etc). The rise of music streaming services has severely eaten into the sales of individual song downloads. Very few people are listening to their music on audiophile-grade home stereo systems. They're mainly listening on a wide variety of devices (mobile phones, work computers, car stereo systems, tablets, portable Bluetooth speaker boxes, etc). Music is often treated as background noise for other activities.
I think viewers hold image quality from a movie to a higher standard than they do audio quality from music.
quote: Scott Jentsch
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.
Only a small minority of people have residential Internet connections whose plans have maximum download speeds of 100Mb/s or greater. My connection's speed is only 1/8th your 200Mb/s service, but 25 megabit service is still good enough to be considered well above average. I could get up to 250Mb/s from my local cable ISP, but I would pay a hell of a lot for it.
Most "broadband" users are still stuck in mediocre DSL-like speeds of 3Mb/s-6Mb/s. The content on all streaming platforms is encoded for that common denominator. The streaming services are not going to post better than Blu-ray encodes if that means most customers waiting forever for the content to buffer/download. Most users just want the movie starting right away with as few hiccups during start-up and playback as possible. Netflix cemented itself as the most popular movie streaming service because it did more with its network backbone than competitors to reduce buffering issues.
With that being said, I routinely see 1080p video quality on streaming services look better than the same content does on satellite TV. That wasn't always the case. I'd rather watch a program streaming from HBO GO than watch the same show playing through Dish Network on one of the HBO channels. Video streams on digital satellite are severely compressed by necessity.
I think image quality from streaming services with incrementally improve as a greater percentage of viewers gain access to Internet connections faster than 20Mb/s. We're not there yet. But just like the days of 56k dial-up modems this paradigm of Internet service will pass.
quote: Scott Jentsch
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)
I think the days of physical disc-based media are numbered. Retail video sales/rental stores have disappeared completely in many communities. The same goes for music stores. Even book stores are dying off rapidly. Too many people want their "content" now and are not willing to wait a day or two for a physical movie/music disc or book to arrive in the mail. If the current trend keeps going on its current path it won't take many more years before mass retailers like Target and Walmart clear their floor space of that kind of product.
I recently bought a new pickup truck (a 2018 Chevy Silverado LT "Texas Edition" to replace the aging 2002 Silverado I drove for 16 years). I was actually pleasantly surprised to see the stereo system still had a CD player. Quite a few new cars and trucks no longer have CD players. It's just USB ports and Bluetooth connections for your personal music connection and then a receiver for Sirius|XM.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 09-08-2018 04:01 PM
I recently listened to the PULSE live recording of Pink Floyd using the streaming service included with my car lease (Deezer). It lists separate tracks for that concert and if I'm not mistaken, Dark Side of the Moon is played in its entirety during that concert ![[Smile]](smile.gif) .
It played without any audible gaps, which was a first for me, because even Spotify wouldn't be able to handle that.
It's not really that difficult to do it, it's more a matter of just getting it right. Most people are just too lazy to do it.
It's been a while, but I once built decoding and playback software, supporting OGG and FLAC natively. Most players take the shortcut of closing the audio-device and re-opening it after playing each track. Why? Because it's simpler to program it that way. I didn't do that. Even if one track was encoded in OGG, the other in FLAC and the other just a simple wave file, I wouldn't close the audio device or wipe the output buffers, to enable a smooth transition between tracks. Even if songs were in a different sample rate, I wouldn't simply reset the audio device to the bitrate and let the audio drivers and audio devices figure it out, I would resample it to the bitrate the output buffer was initialized to... I'm pretty sure they're all far too lazy to do this anymore.
Sometimes you can "trick" your playback software to do something that's almost identical to "seamless" playback of albums that are supposed to be played back uninterrupted: Use the auto-crossfading option and make the cross-fading time as short as possible.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 09-09-2018 01:00 PM
I would like to agree with you, but unfortunately, the reality looks a little different.
Yes, people will buy stuff "a pop", but they're far more likely to buy a subscription to something that gives them "more" than to pay for anything individually.
I know, because I've seen it happen. In the past, I did some on-demand streaming projects for ISPs and telcos. In the very beginning, you only had a bunch of crap on those on-demand services, but eventually, high-profile Hollywood productions and popular series would turn up on them. Still, most of the services ended up as loss-leaders. None of the on-demand services I know of, ever really made it. Yes, maybe the iTunes store did, but only for music, but everything else is mostly dead now.
You only need to look at the models that have been successful to see that most of the people, aren't really interested in pay-per-view.
The old Netflix model for example, was an alternative for the pay-per-view model of the bygone video rental store era and it did its part in destroying the entire video rental industry.
The popularity of the "all-you-can-eat" buffet and similar formulas. All-inclusive hotel resorts, cruises, etc. Or even the much discussed MoviePass, that offered a loss-leading "all-you-can-watch" subscription, that nevertheless attracted roughly three million customers in the U.S. alone.
The "new" model of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, you name it... it's all examples of "all you can eat" formulas.
I think we'll see an era, where all-you-can-watch streaming services will compete with each other, with exclusive content, price and features. Most people will simply choose two or maximum three services and be done with what's on them. If something isn't on there, they simply don't watch it, until it eventually will become available. Unless, you happen to be that immortal fan that will just buy the subscription anyways.
I'm not saying that I'm happy with this situation, but I'm simply afraid that's how it already mostly is and how it will be for the foreseeable future. The battles for the streaming subscribers have just begun.
Unfortunately, what you'll also see is that the quality of the individual subscription services will go down. High quality content is pretty expensive and there is just a limited amount of it available. Creating sufficient new, high quality content based on bottom-feeding subscription rates will be challenging, if not even entirely impossible. Even Netflix and Amazon have learned you can still earn a pretty buck with a theatrical release, for example.
That's why I also expect to see a diversification in the type of streaming services. Where an HBO and Disney might choose to go for more quality output and Netflix and Amazon might purely focus on the binge-watcher that needs to have an evening-filling program, every day.
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