I'm going to bet the overwhelming majority of users don't care about either. This is Netflix cutting costs by requiring less data to serve their content at the quality that's good enough to make most people happy.

Any time I talk to anyone outside our nerd bubble I'm reminded and humbled by what simply doesn't register as relevant to them.

Conscious and subconscious awareness are different things. The mythical "most person" can't describe the difference between a blocky artifacted video and a clean high-bitrate video, but they will prefer the clean over the blocky and enjoy it more.

Sure, but OP argued they didn't care. I don't think its a question of conscious awareness, but rather opportunity cost.

The lessened quality is not something (most) people will cancel their subscription for, nor would they go out and buy the dvd just to get the better quality.

That's true now but in the future when people start realizing that "Pay this premium for amazing 16K content!" doesn't do shit when they sit in their couches with their normal size tv:s we are gonna start hearing "Pay this premium for our 4k option with our Premium Non-Blocky Patented Compression Algorithm SilkComper™"

I think that's probably true if they got to A B test the options.

Further, they aren’t going to cancel their subscription because it’s blocky. What would they do instead, go out and buy The Office box set, and a optical drive to play it with?

These experience degradation pushes people gradually towards a cliff.

Another competing thing comes up in people's life (it need not be even in the same category), the previous one would be dropped if there are unpleasant association with it - conscious or subconscious.

OR, ..need to cut back (finance, digital wellbeing, etc.), again the first thing would go out is the one which is associated with less value i.e., of lesser quality, not living upto expectation, and so on..

You would still buy the burger even if it has a few fewer sesame seeds, would you? ... until there are just three artfully placed seeds on each bun and nobody buys any?

No, but they might pirate (but I bet yify is even worse)

On the contrary, the pirated media I've seen has been by far the highest-quality. It doesn't have to be delivered live, so encoding can be more efficient, and the source is almost always a 4k blu-ray or whatever else is the best that can be bought. In many cases it's even better than playing it through a DVD player because your computer uses better codecs.

Netflix (and most of Youtube) is offline encoded.

I believe the limitation being referred to is that they're bandwidth-constrained -- encoding for streaming needs to strongly favor size over quality.

Netflix needs a movie to be 500MB whereas torrents can happily be 2-8GB

Or 50GB, for some torrents 4K torrents.

I've heard from Netflix people that they re-encode their entire library every month. They are continually improving their encoding and storage tools so the streaming bandwidth/quality savings dwarfs the costs of re-encoding.

Is it really easy to find high quality pirated content?

I've got the impression that highly-compressed content is often so popular that bigger/higher quality files are hard to find.

As someone who occasionally downloads unlicensed content, I find that most movies (and occasionally high profile TV shows or those with a focus on visuals--like BBC's nature docs) are available in multiple qualities.

There are the basic 300-700mb copies for people who just want to watch something and don't have the time or bandwidth to bother with amazing quality (these look like your typical compressed cable or "tube" stream).

Then there are the 720/1080 versions which are still pretty compressed but at least encoded with decent settings and at a resolution that doesn't look bad on an average TV. Often these are "webrips" where someone capped the stream from Amazon or whatever online streaming rental service had the movie.

And last are the massive bluray rips that can go over 50GB in size and include 10bit HDR video, Dolby Atmos, etc. I never bother with these because honestly, if I'm pirating a movie/show it's because I'm not sure I'll enjoy it or it's just not available for me to watch yet. The movies I would want in maximum quality are the ones I would be buying anyway.

I'm sure plenty of people can't or won't buy the official blurays so these are the alternative, but for me, "bootleg" copies are the equivalent of "I'd watch it if it was on TV" but not a replacement for stuff I'm really invested in seeing at max quality because I love it.

Amazon's 1080p copies are usually very good quality, certainly comparable to the bluray release. Pirates have been able to download and strip DRM from there and itunes, etc. for a long time, no capturing+re-encoding necessary.

(Throwaway account)

Depends on the content but if it’s something remotely popular, and was released on BluRay, the answer is yes. The most popular torrent at the moment apparently 1.92GB BluRay rip of Joker (2019), with 8k seeders.

There’re 2 higher-quality versions found on the Internets, 6GB and 16GB. Both have 4k video encoded in 10-bit h265, have 5.1 / 7.1 audio, the former one has 1k seeders, the latter 100. These numbers are very approximate, I haven’t downloaded nor watched that movie. But usually, even 100 seeders is enough to saturate my 120 mbit/sec download link.

YMMV.

This is much harder than simply opening the netflix app built into your TV.

I'm bothered by the netflix quality every time I use it, but the hassle to download the movie before hand, connect my laptop to the HDMI, need to get up to control it, need to get up to move the mouse to make it disappear, etc. makes it a non-option. Sure there are solutions to those problems, but they're also work.

What makes you think it’s worse exactly?

I’m probably on the few folks who was searching for a copy of “The Witcher Season 1” on Blu-ray until I realized Netflix wouldn’t want to compete against its own platform.

Would be a major point of contention for content producers seeking to become Netflix originals. Traditional studios still produce lossless versions which then see re-releases in whatever format would be best decades after the original run has ended e.g. Sopranos getting a BR release, etc

Many popular Netflix originals have been released on Blu-Ray.

I'm on the Netflix SD service. It's never bothered me at all and I don't see a particular reason to upgrade.

I enjoy watching the BBC on HD, however for stuff like the Attenborough films.

I have watched Planet Earth in 4K (Real 4K not Netflix "4K"). on my new Home Cinema and it's the most beautiful digital content I have ever witnessed. Absolutely incredible.

I think that’s the best use for 4k, there are lots of tiny details in nature that come to life in 4k. For other things, movies and such it may even make it worse in some cases, too much detail isn’t always better.

Recently switched from a - what used to be high-end 10 years ago - 1080p plasma TV to a 4k OLED with HDR, and I must say, the HDR is much more impressive than the 4k tbh... 1080p with HDR would be fine for me...

I personally don't care. I even usually opt for the cheaper Netflix without "Full HD".

Just recently I was watching a Blu-Ray, while I'm mostly watching Netflix these days. There was a nice gray to dark gradient in in the intro and I noticed I was expecting some posterization artifacts and... there were none. ;)

Kind of sad that I'm already used to them it seems.

Compressed blacks / greys, they work until they don't.

Especially for drama and horror where dark scenes and night scenes are frequent!

Quality doesn't really matter for the general audience, beyond some reasonable threshold. https://mux.com/blog/youtube-viewers-dont-care-about-video-q...

Engagement seems a pretty blunt metric for this. Especially since Youtube has a near monopoly on user generated video content. A user would have to be mightily perturbed to abandon their favorite content altogether over poor video quality.

I bet most of those 90% of people who stuck with 480p don't even know they can manually set the resolution.

Yeah the image quality is poor, and it's especially frustrating for ad-based video streaming sites like Hulu or Tubi. The movie struggles to get 720p, buffering a few times, then the ad comes loud and bright at 1080p instantly.

+1 H.264 on Youtube is often comparable to files compressed at crf of ~30+, and while VP9 is more efficient, it also comes with weird encoding artifacts.

Does 4K Netflix target 50 Mbps? Blu-ray does. While lossy compression performance is a deep and incomplete field, more bits always helps. That requires more storage on servers and more throughput. There needs to be a “good enough” point and the hosts will glue themselves to it. If it moves up over time then they will have to update their library where high quality sources are available.

Netflix recomends a 25 Mbps download speed to watch UHD but according to some redditor it is actually at 15.6[1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/5lc2nl/what_bitrat...

Honestly, I find the quality decent. I watch so much content on YouTube; making the encoding artifacts imperceptible would mean I need more mobile data. Here in Canada, mobile data is more expensive than anywhere else in the world, so it can make a difference of about $500 CAD a year, the cost of a new mid-market smartphone.

The sad thing is, they could offer two levels of peak quality, one less than today’s and the other more than today’s—and their overall data usage rate would probably go down not up... especially if the lower bitrate was marketed as “faster starts, less buffering” etc.

Don't these services adapt the quality based on the quality of your network connection? In which case, it might be the same thing.

I agree that quality is not satisfactory, Im not convinced that it is the top problem to solve either. Let me explain: I read that video streaming was 50% of Internet's bandwidth, itself was about 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions. It's quite significant, and I would love quite the opposite of your reasoning: a lesser quality to leave us, engineers, time to find a sustainable way of watching videos online.

Should we guess whether you've done any air travel in the past couple of years? (I have too, I'm a hypocrite as well.)

I have no idea the source of your number. I see half a percent here[1]. That is also possibly inaccurate, because at least one major internet company offsets all their carbon emissions with things like farm animal feces digestors and methane recapture covers for mines. Even if it is three percent, it's not clear that a given amount of bandwidth is responsible for the same fraction of emissions. Also, perhaps the more people watch movies, the less they drive around and do fun things outside the house. So it may be that for each % you increase internet emissions you decrease other emissions by %*2. Who knows?

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-f...

That's not really relevant, though. The point is not "Video produces significant emissions, therefore it is bad." The point is "Video produces significant emissions, therefore making it more efficient would be good." The fact that video is not as bad as something else has no bearing on whether video could be made even better. It's worth bringing up because in a decision between x% better image quality or x% lower emissions, the total amount of those emissions is the key piece of information.

Why don’t you go beat up on useless technology which provably pisses away energy (by design!) like the blockchain before you claiming consuming video content on the internet is killing the planet.

There's no need to get defensive over this. One can do both.

Useless to you does not mean useless to other people and unless you somehow are the person who has an ultimate mandate over valuing things throughout the universe, then it's just your opinion.

If you for some reason have that mandate, you might as well look at other "useless" industries such as christmas lights, mechanical watch production (very demanding and "useless", right? since quartz watches are much cheaper and more accurate anyway?), vinyl records (think of all that plastic!!!), road lighting during the night (most roads don't have any visitors for hours!), jewelry, public webcams (all that energy and data transfer!). How about heating in far up north? How much energy is "wasted" there, "why don't all those people just move"? Or expensive motherboards which have thousands of components, of which only a small part will realistically be used by the owner... Or gaming consoles which can in fact be used for other calculations, but damn uselessly stuck there to just produce some 3d simulations... Or gaming in general, how much does that "waste"?

Basically what I'm trying to say is that your line of reasoning is extremely selfish and short-sighted, and there are people who would very much like to have some blockchains working, and they will keep doing so, just like they will keep setting up and powering christmas lights and paying for their gaming rigs and buying expensive watches that take a fortune to manufacture.

It feels a bit irresponsible to through around unsourced numbers like that. Makes responding responsibly difficult.

Sending data through the internet contributes to 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions? Finding a 'sustainable way to watch videos online'? I think you have your numbers mixed up. Maybe you are confusing the amount of electricity all computers use with the internet and CO2 emissions.

For anyone interested in some more novel ways of reducing video bandwidth with neural networks using foveated rendering to 'recreate/generate' the high res frames client side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUmmW4ispA

Computers use electricity. Find a way to generate electricity without CO2. If people can't watch videos of foreign places then they will have to travel to foreign countries which will cause more CO2.