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And they lagged like nobodies business when they were loading despite having 11Mbps down all to myself.


11Mbps is less than half the FCC's definition of broadband: 25Mbps down.


IIRC Netflix's absolute highest bitrate is 15.6 Mbps (for 4k). This is ~5 seconds of much less than 4k.


> 15.6 Mbps (for 4k)

That must be laughable quality. 1080p blurays easily clock in at more than 22Mbit/s for grainy content, the spec allows 40Mbit/s. And that's not even including the audio. UHD discs must deliver at least 82Mbit/s.

And a lot of content is not even using the things that UHD standards allow to deliver (4:4:4 chroma instead of 4:2:0, higher framerates). So even if they're delivering in HEVC is suspect that the compression is not source-transparent.


Netflix has pretty good compression but yeah this is why I canceled my 4k subscription when they announced they were raising prices. I think 4k is currently $4/mo more and I have a gigabit connection. If they are going to charge 30% more for the privilege they shouldn't compress it to the point where it's not appreciably different from upscaling 1080p.

Streaming services really frustrate me for that reason. I get that bandwidth costs money but when e.g. Play Movies advertises a movie rental for $5 but when that actually means $5 for SD (who the hell even uses SD) but $10 for UHD when it's compressed to shit, what service are you actually providing me?


I had that speed in 2005 and it was slow then, too.




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