Netflix is on Fire • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix is on Fire

#161

Post by teh_klev » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:58 AM UTC

hellbanner wrote: post #117

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Government have made the BBC cover the cost of free TV licenses, which means their budget for actual content is now £750m smaller. And there has been the suggestion that the BBC be banned from making entertainment programmes like The Voice , which would ensure the company is less popular with the public and less likely to garner sympathy in future.

"There has been the suggestion".. by whom?

See:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/29/bbc-the-voice-i...

Kind of a moot point now seeing as the BBC were outbid for the next series:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34756063

Re: Netflix is on Fire

#162

Post by thirdsun » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 10:03 AM UTC

asb wrote: post #89

thirdsun wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that that's really the issue. The music industry has solved all those problems long ago - I can buy a lossless version of practically any album, free of DRM and knowing that those files will be mine and forever playable. Here in europe, and I'm assuming the US as well, there's no way to buy and own a movie or TV show in a similar way. It's either DRM or physical media, usually accompanied by long delays…

I haven't found lossless music to be easy to come by legally, am I missing some large site? Amazon for instance only sells MP3s.

Amazon and iTunes are after the big crowd and cater to a an audience where lossless audio probably isn't the key feature.

I buy everything in lossless format and rarely have to look very hard - the few times I had to it turned out to be a vinyl or CD-only release, which wasn't available lossy either. I'm into rather obscure stuff, which may actually help here - I'm not sure but could imagine that it's harder to get lossless audio for the top 40.

Well, here are the stores I use: - Bleep - Boomkat - Qobuz (most iTunes-like with a big selection across all genres, including classic and jazz) - Bandcamp - HDTracks (beware, snake oil! There's no need to go above CD quality in my opinion) - Label / artists stores (yes, many labels or artists sell their music directly without middlemen and in a wider range of formats) - last resort: what.cd or buy the CD and rip it yourself

Re: Netflix is on Fire

#163

Post by soylentcola » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:01 PM UTC

Fargren wrote: post #146

soylentcola wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On bigger screens and/or ones closer to the viewer it's definitely a noticeable improvement. It's obviously compressed and not up to the standard of a really high bitrate 4k video file but I guess it's equivalent to how "HD" on cable doesn't look as good as HD over the air but it still looks a lot nicer than standard def or DVD. One major downside is that you can't stream 4K Netflix or Amazon to your browser so even…

I also have a 27" 2560x1440 monitor and while the content looks fine, the video gets really choppy if I don't configure my monitor to 1920x1080, as if it's struggling to resize the video. Does this not happen to you?

Sorry for the late reply, but whenever I stream from Netflix, Amazon, or Youtube, I just let it stream at whatever their site determines as the max my connection can handle and it never looks choppy in fullscreen. The only time there's any issue is when bandwidth is limited for whatever reason and the site needs to drop down to a lower quality stream.

I assume you've already covered this but just in case, do you have the most recent drivers and software for your GPU? I know in the past that (on Windows systems at least) using the default "mostly works" driver that comes with the OS, I'll notice issues with performance because I'm missing any hardware acceleration that the Intel/nVidia/AMD GPU can do.

Typically I notice it on work machines that just got reimaged with a generic OS image and don't have the relevant GPU drivers installed yet. Moving windows around, resizing, and other windowing tasks are a bit choppy until I download the appropriate package.

Again, I assume you already thought of this if you're specifically buying a higher resolution display than the average cheap PC comes with. Still, it's the only thing that I've had affect framerate/refresh in fullscreen video in the past.

Re: Netflix is on Fire

#164

Post by brownbat » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 11:06 PM UTC

soylentcola wrote: post #35

brownbat wrote: post #21

They spent the last 10 years conducting massive studies of what people like to watch. If they weren't able to come up with some hits after that, then they weren't trying. Somewhere behind the scenes, Netflix is applying sabermetrics to Hollywood. Except it's worse than in baseball... Unlike Oakland, all their competitors (except maybe Amazon) can't just copy their approach, because all their data is private, not publ…

Sure, but you'd think that with all of the market research done by TV and cable over the past several decades (and it's not as if Comcast and Time Warner don't track what people watch on their digital cable services) they'd have some inkling as to what's currently in demand and what may be underrepresented. Perhaps it's just more efficient for Netflix to commission content or buy it and then distribute it themselves.…

> they'd have some inkling as to what's currently in demand and what may be underrepresented.

My working assumption is that the lessons learned from the prediction engine they've built are a qualitative leap over just "what's popular, assuming all of the US is composed of identical viewers." Or even a few demographic divisions.

Eh, I could be wrong though. Maybe this is just a gutcheck, I think Netflix is better at data science than other studios, because they have more experience working with programmers and large datasets.