So maybe a more useful comment than video-range/full-range pedantry over historical brokenness: Banding (which I think is the root cause of all your complaints

So maybe a more useful comment than video-range/full-range pedantry over historical brokenness: Banding (which I think is the root cause of all your complaints) is effectively due to overly coarse quantization. This is amplified in H.264 (which Netflix and Amazon generally use) since the signal has multiple 8bit -> 10+bit -> 8bit trips, with each 8bit reduction contributing additional errors that can effectively result in small changes between blocks in the input signal amplified into noticeable differences in the output. And it's more noticeable in low-light scenes since current standards' gamma transfer functions compress a bit too much on the lower end (maybe my personal opinion there...) The easiest solution is to have more discrete steps at each intermediate point. But for that to really help you'd need to change codecs from 8-bit H.264, which means not being playable on many devices. I mean, you could get 15% finer quantization with full-range 0-255 over video-range 16-235, but that doesn't help that much; you really need the 4x that 10bit gives you to be noticeable. The second easiest solution is to have a debanding postfilter. But between the wide variety of platforms Netflix/Amazon have to run on, and modern DRM requirements, that's also not really an option. So ultimately, you're left with developing prefilters to try to shape where bits are needed for given scenes, and careful tuning of your encoder. Which Netflix (presumably) has a several year head start over Amazon on.