Three things would have prevented streaming from gaining in popularity:

- Slow Internet speeds. This has changed.

- Cable bills not increasing. If cable was cheap no one would care about Netflix. But when it gets around $200/month most people start questioning why they need cable TV. I did and changed my plan to Internet only, and have not regretted it. Cable TV is garbage and it's cheaper to pay $10/month for HBO GO or STARZ rather than have to have a $75, $80, $100 specific cable package and then pay $10 to get it on your cable box. OTA TV has improved and is a lot better than it used to be, at least where I live.

- Netflix and other services not being available on practically anything with a screen and CPU. I think most people who watch Netflix on a computer are broke college students with no other choice or doing so at work, but most are using their smart TV, Roku, game console, or other similar devices.

Slow internet speeds have not changed for all of America.

But the blame goes back to the cable companies there.

If you're in range of a 4g LTE tower, an mvno data only plan is more than sufficient. The only wired internet available to my house is dsl, and the company could only guarantee 4mb speed because I'm at the tail end of their network. I found ubifi [1] which was perfect as att are the only strong signal around here. Streaming video is no problem, though large downloads such as VM images really suck.

1 https://www.ubifi.net

Internet speeds are higher, alas the latency is still perceptibly there and for the set of games I play you cannot really beat the speed of light: It does matter.

Regardless, what bothers me and many others is streaming games becoming the industry standard due to the DRM benefits and taking away ownership from gamers. That would be really shitty.

Why would latency be an issue with streaming recorded video - the subject of the post?

You'll be happy to know that the current latencies are about two orders of magnitude higher than what going at the speed of light will offer. That makes me think that we will easily see a 10x improvement in latency in 15-20 years.

Source to that? My napkin math tells me speed of light across US is ~10ms, my experience tells me latency is ~100ms (certainly not 1s), so that's only one of of magnitude.

You are not going to stream games from the west coast to the east coast. It will be more like a data center in/near your city to your home (..say.. within a 50km radius). Currently, that pathway isn't very well optimized and I routinely see local services having a latency of 30+ ms in the bay area.

I am suggesting this will be significantly more optimized, not how fast you can communicate over long distances.

How do you get two orders of magnitude? Round trip for light is ~150 ms. Using a cable it is slower, so more like 250 ms. Current latencies are only like 2x that.

Even with free space speeds and tunnels through the earth you only get like one order of magnitude.

you think we'll able to communicate faster than light?

No, the poster is saying that latencies are about 100x the theretical minimum latency due to speed of light, and thinks that will reduce to 10x.

I don’t know if these numbers are true, but poster was not claiming faster than light.

There are several reasons why Internet latency is inflated over direct-route speed-of-light latency. Some reasons may change others may not.

1) speed of light in fibre is 2/3c - unlikely to change soon 2) fibre is laid in the ground on a circuitous route - rarely changes but does happen 3) queueing delay - that's often the main culprit, changeable, but hard (see the buffer bloat debate)

Quality is still an issue for streaming. Anyone who's ever compared a blu-ray to what Netflix offers knows it's night and day, especially for grainy old films. Netflix so-called "1080p" frequently has compression artifacts, and banding (most visible in dark shots). There's also disturbing aliasing (most visible in logos and on-screen fonts, causing jagged edges) which is more reminiscent of DVD-era MPEG-2 encoding than modern codecs. I'm constantly put off anytime I find a title on Netflix the minute I compare to it bluray screencaps (good resources are blu-ray.com or caps-a-holic) and notice the glaring contrast in quality.

And this is only for the titles Netflix offers in HD: there are many, probably due to licensing issues, which are offered only in SD resolution (which can be confirmed during playback vie the web player debugger). Netflix originals, while seemingly having the most consistent quality, still suffer from poor encoding issues I've noticed, which makes me think most of all that this is aggressive bandwidth management if even their own titles aren't given a proper encoding treatment.

And then for 4k playback on PC, it's required you have not only a compatible browser or app (4k playback in Firefox will not work), but also a recent CPU that supports hardware DRM - just awful. The future of streaming is bleak if you ask me, albeit convenient for the average consumer. And I guess that's the real demographic.

Most people don't even set the right aspect ratio on content. They don't care about quality.

I've seen people watch warped video because they, for some reason, prefer it to bars on the screen.

It's well known that netflix is serving low quality bitrate. What they sell as HD is approaching the 480p from youtube from years ago.

It's marketing bullshit and cost savings, slapping the word HD on everything to lure the customers. Cut the bitrate to save on bandwidth costs.

Many homes don't have the 8+ Mbps required to stream high quality videos, they couldn't get HD even if they wanted to.

Doesn't mean people were wrong 15 years ago. At the time most of those things were real issues. Especially speed.

As Real "buffering ..." Networks found to their chagrin.

Speed and data caps. 100GB doesn’t last long when you’re streaming Netflix and YouTube all day.

Same arguments are made against streaming gaming today! Even on HN

Self driving cars is probably a better example