7 ms·
Internet is already fast enough to stream high quality movies. The reason you can only access a comprehensive list of movies thru iTunes or disks is legal, not
by nuguy 8y ago
Internet is already fast enough to stream high quality movies. The reason you can only access a comprehensive list of movies thru iTunes or disks is legal, not technological.
- TomMarius 8y agoReally? Most people still use internet slower than 10 Mb/s and treat a computer as an enemy that works against them.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoSource? I don’t know if any isp that still offers 10mbit service.
- ndnxhs 8y agoHaha, come to Australia. That's faster than the connection my whole office at work shares. I don't know anyone who could stream a bluray which is usually about 40gb for an hour of video.
- udp 8y agoPretty standard in the UK outside of major towns/cities.
- zimpenfish 8y agoNot that uncommon outside of major towns/cities either - I was getting barely 12Mbps on ADSL in inner London, and that only 600m from an exchange.
- nicoburns 8y agoADSL speeds aren't great, but fibre is available almost everywhere in cities in the UK...
- zimpenfish 8y agoTrue. Although even on fibre, I only get 25Mbps peak. Often it's hovering around 18-20Mbps (which is not quite enough for 4K streaming, IIRC.)
- TomMarius 8y agoAnd even that is surely not just for you, but shared.
- somabc 8y agoOf course that's fake fibre aka fibre to the green cabinet in your street. The UK allows that to be marketed as fibre despite the large difference in performance to a real fibre connection.
- zimpenfish 8y agoHaving since upgraded to real fibre (I saw the man splice it into the router connector with my own eyes), the difference is staggering - now I regularly get 500Mbps+ up and down with not infrequent 800Mbps+.
- justtopost 8y agoI am half hour from a major metro, I would gladly pay another 80/mo to have 1.5m on a semi reliable basis. You take a lot for granted. Our infrastructure sucks ouside the suburban bubble.
- bradstewart 8y agoWow I'd forgotten how lucky I am right now--that's what I pay for gigabit fiber. Thanks for the perspective.
- sethammons 8y agoCome out to Western Montana. CenturyLink would only offer 10mbps/1mbps, of which I was lucky to get about half. They let me upgrade last month to 25/2, of which, I am lucky if a speed test results in 10/1.5. I'll take it as it is quite literally the best I can get. I recently paid Spectrum around $5k to extend a line to my house, but I'll have to wait until spring for it and its 400/25 (I am counting the days!).
- TomMarius 8y agohttps://o2.cz https://o2.cz My top speed is 8 Mb/s. This is the most prominent provider in my country. My plan is 20 Mb/s, but that has literally never happened. A lot of people in my country use wifi providers with outdated equipment, giving them around 10 Mb/s as well. And lastly, check the page on average speeds of the Internet on Wikipedia. BTW the absolute majority of customers are sharing their bandwidth and the infrastructure is built with that in mind. If everyone streamed 4K videos, the actual speed would go down massively - of course since the only solution would be to rebuild the infrastructure, that is not going to happen, instead they will lower the speed or introduce FUP. You can see Czech Republic pretty high in that list - that's because it's average speed, not median. I have a friend that has a 600 Mb/s plan that's 3 times cheaper than mine, but that's not the norm - and I guess it's similar all around the world, either you're lucky... or not.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoNot at BR quality. Well, it may be fast enough in sections, but it isn't economical to send out thousands of BR quality streams, so they don't. Newer codecs help with that, yes. However, streaming will not be as high quality as a "station wagon full of tapes" i.e. local, in the near future.
- loeg 8y agoEasily at BR quality with a high speed connection — it's only 20-30 mbps — but as you say, consumers don't care enough to pay what it would cost to stream at higher bitrates.