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Why would apple et al follow? Unless there is any noticeable affect on quality/streaming ease then consumers won't care. You have to remember that most people

Why would apple et al follow? Unless there is any noticeable affect on quality/streaming ease then consumers won't care. You have to remember that most people can't/won't tell the difference between blueray and DVD, let alone bitrate change. More importantly they have lots of silly TV effects that actively fuck with the picture (Sharpening, Aspect ratio stretching, over saturation, active motion, and other horrid "enhancements") The only reason netflix et al is a thing is because of the content, not the platform. (just look at how shit iTunes is to use) You can make the most wonderful interface in the world, but if there is no content, there is no point. Streaming does cost money, but that's not the main cost of business. Most cost comes from licensing the content in the first place. (Then paying all your staff to do fancy things) Seriously bandwidth is pretty cheap, compared the the cost of buy the license to broadcast a top rated movie. (a high ranking movie is easily a few $million. custom TV series is anywhere between 1 and 30+ million for a season.)

sleepychu 11y ago
One of the big things that drew me to amazon's platform was their 'ASAP' streaming. It wasted my bandwidth to begin streaming all the stuff I might be about to open and as a result it seemed seamless. If Netflix can make my film stream at a high resolution faster and buffer less, over time I'll notice the buffering more on other platforms and just use Netflix instead.
johngunderman 11y ago
The article seems to focus too much on the consumer side of the bandwidth equation. I think the real win for Netflix is the aggregate egress bandwidth savings from their DCs. If Netflix can halve their bandwidth (as the article seems to claim) without any appreciable loss in quality, they've just saved substantially in the infrastructure and peering contracts needed to deliver their content. I have no idea how much money Netflix currently spends on bandwidth/CDN, but I'd guess it's certainly in the 100s of millions. I can imagine that Amazon and Apple would be very interested in emulating those savings.
sbouafif 11y ago
I think Apple already does that for the content delivered by iTunes

sleepychu 11y ago

One of the big things that drew me to amazon's platform was their 'ASAP' streaming. It wasted my bandwidth to begin streaming all the stuff I might be about to open and as a result it seemed seamless. If Netflix can make my film stream at a high resolution faster and buffer less, over time I'll notice the buffering more on other platforms and just use Netflix instead.

johngunderman 11y ago

The article seems to focus too much on the consumer side of the bandwidth equation. I think the real win for Netflix is the aggregate egress bandwidth savings from their DCs. If Netflix can halve their bandwidth (as the article seems to claim) without any appreciable loss in quality, they've just saved substantially in the infrastructure and peering contracts needed to deliver their content. I have no idea how much money Netflix currently spends on bandwidth/CDN, but I'd guess it's certainly in the 100s of millions. I can imagine that Amazon and Apple would be very interested in emulating those savings.

sbouafif 11y ago

I think Apple already does that for the content delivered by iTunes