Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res.

>Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res.

True, but that is why this is a hard engineering challenge -- there are a lot of variations on client-side devices which need to be supported well. Upgrade cycles for TVs is 3x that of phones, is my guess.

'That' being DRM?

Except there are only 3 DRM providers, and as a streaming service provider you just wrap the 3 providers libraries and write a few config files.

Its not that. I'm on a lg c2 with a modern Chromecast (or whatever name Google is calling it now) plugged in. Its all new stuff.

Are you behind a CG-NAT? Not all companies have caught up to the fact that one IP is used by multiple customers now.

Things like throttling by IP Address which used to be a viable option is not effective anymore.

Don't think so. Does cgnat use private IP space? I'm not familiar with how it works.

Sorta. It's like NAT except it's at your carrier. Multiple customers share the same IP.

If an attack or abuse comes from a CG-NAT address they have to throttle the IP and all the customers behind it.

If it’s not a cgnat, your ISP could be throttling everyone that isn’t using a whitelisted site. Try using speedtest.net or fast.com just before streaming, and see if it fixes peacock.

I wonder if that's more an issue with them than you. I subscribed to peacock for one month during the Olympics, and it was terrible. Streams frequently were stuck at something super-low 320p, or just halted to that stupid sad cat error page.

Cutesy error pages are cute exactly once, then they're even worse than a minimally viable error page.

Maybe the issue is on their side. Their best outcome is you paying for 4k hdr and streaming 720p. Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.

> Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.

Not enough to hurt a paid service. Let's say 6Mbps for pretty solid 1080p. And at peak maybe we have .5 streams per account going simultaneously (I bet the real number is significantly lower). So we need 3Mbps per account. How much does a Mbps cost? "Across key cities in the U.S. and Europe, 400 GigE prices range from $0.07 to $0.08 per Mbps."

Peacock doesn't even offer 4K most of the time or on the olympics, but for services that do a $1 upcharge should be more than enough to cover the bandwidth difference.

I'd be happy with 1080p.

Who does 6Mbps for 1080p? I thought HD topped out at 3Mbps, and 4K was around the 6+Mbps

Twitch is typically 6Mbps+ and 1080p, though with more time to encode you can get the same quality out of fewer bits. Netflix can go up to about 20Mbps for 4K if my searches can be believed, but I didn't test it myself. When I've grabbed videos off Nebula they're a lot bigger than youtube; one here that doesn't even have much motion is 4Mbps at 1080p. And crunchyroll has a lot of 8Mbps at 1080p.

But acceptable quality can definitely go smaller. Especially if "acceptable" is judged by the significant compression artifacts I see on actual cable TV all the time.

I laughed.

Netflix 4K is some bs in my experience. A 4K file of the same show, pirated, is vastly better quality. Whatever they do to it is just vandalism.

4K doesn't really say anything about image quality, just the resolution of the picture, which tells you the theoretical maximum level of visual detail.

Focusing on resolution is like asking "how strong is one meter of rope" without talking about the composition of the rope.

With streaming video, image quality ultimately comes down to the codec and the bitrate. They probably use a relatively low bitrate regardless of codec.

Bitrate can be massive with a low quality video so that also doesn't tell you much.

Bitrate, resolution, and codec are all of course critical, and not knowing all three makes it impossible to judge how good or bad it will look. Sadly the resolution is the only one of the three that's easy to describe to consumers, so here we are.

IME Netflix is a close 2nd best after Apple, which I don't think I can distinguish from a 4K BluRay. I've found that the quality depends on the platform a little -- for Netflix the native LG app seems to look best on my LG TV, while Apple looks best on the Apple TV app (perhaps unsurprisingly).

Amazon Prime 4K HDR on the other hand looks like garbage on every platform I've used -- the compression is unbearable in any dark scene.

I would put Disney+ after apple. Both AppleTV+ and Disney+ consistently looks great to me. Netflix is strange as it generally looks good but whatever compression they use does something funny to the picture which makes it look fuzzy and sharp at the same time to me.

Netflix is actually the lowest bitrate offering.

Netflix: 15-18 Mbps Disney+: 25-30 Mbps Amazon Prime Video: 15-18 Mbps Apple TV+: 25-40 Mbps HBO Max: 15-20 Mbps

This is from an LLM but it tallies with what I remember reading. Apple TV is by far the best, followed by Disney+.

Netflix unfortunately seem to use any improvement in compression encoding efficiency to reduce bitrates, rather than improve PQ at the same bitrate. It's definitely got worse over time. I also remember reading that for content they deem more compressible they use a lower bitrate.

I can sort of get that on the lower plans, but its frustrating they won't improve PQ (or at least keep it the same) for the (expensive) 4K plan.

Its just them being cheap. They probably set every one to a max of 720p, hope most people do not realise (cutting down bandwidth costs) and let them set max quality themselves.

They just need to look at their stock price vs NFLX to realize that people do indeed realize the difference across the stack.

Netflix has been most popular for a bunch of other rather obvious reasons.

On Roku (actual box not integrated) Peacock has been good quality. Definitely hits 1080P with a decent bitrate. I suspect the software teams only have the bandwidth to focus on a few of the more popular devices (so probably Roku and Apple TV boxes) and others suffer

Their 'seek' behavior is also horrendous. IIRC they don't support the standard "click to skip forward 10 seconds" behavior and instead it's either in fast-forward mode or it's not, and in that mode it's impossible to seek to an accuracy of ~1 minute.

Video player controls have been a solved problem for something like several decades. It's actually impressive that they managed to screw it up so badly.

Peacock is terrible. They are, as far as I can tell, the only mainstream service of this sort that actively block Linux users. I can use Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Disney+, Max, Prime Video, etc. from Linux with zero issues. But Peacock? Nope. Doesn't work, and given that it had worked in the past, it seems like they have taken active measures to block Linux and to close any workarounds that let you use their service from a Linux box. So fuck Peacock. They have some content I would watch, and that I'd be happy to pay for. But they actively reject my business, so fuck 'em.