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NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

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Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#111

Post by walkon »

loire280 wrote: post #33
Herring wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hassle of BitTorrent What do you mean? I hadn't noticed.

In my experience these are the shortcomings of using bittorrent: 1. It can take several minutes to find a decent release for titles that are older (>5 years) or less popular. 2. Older/Less popular items are poorly seeded, meaning I potentially have to wait overnight for the download to finish. (A new episode of a current series, however, usually comes in as fast as my broadband connection can handle). 3. Unless you k…

You forgot 5.) It's often illegal

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#112

Post by staunch »

dhess wrote: post #110
sukuriant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix has to deal with DRM. I've asked this question before, and it's not just the "oh, this is good, let's use it!" they've experienced the linux question plenty of times before. They have to submit to whatever their content providers demand they use. Right now, it's Silverlight. :/

I don't buy that. Why is Flash good enough for Hulu's content providers, but not Netflix's?

And why are they okay with Netflix not using Silverlight on the iPad/iPhone?

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#113

Post by elq »

dhess wrote: post #109
elq wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

silverlight supports a DRM implementation that the Studio's are happy with. The alternative would be flash (which is a steaming pile of shit for osx and linux) and DRM for flash is shockingly expensive. With silverlight, I can watch a 720p video on my mbp and use less than one core. I can not say the same for flash.

> With silverlight, I can watch a 720p video on my mbp and use less than one core. I can not say the same for flash. A 720p video from Netflix? That definitely wasn't the case for me last time I tried, maybe 2 months ago. edit: to clarify, it's not even possible to stream 720p from Netflix on a Mac, regardless of how many cores it might take.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/52575/hd%20silverlight%20osx.png

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#114

Post by elq »

staunch wrote: post #112
dhess wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. Why is Flash good enough for Hulu's content providers, but not Netflix's?

And why are they okay with Netflix not using Silverlight on the iPad/iPhone?

because there is no silverlight for iOS.

Silverlight was chosen LONG ago (fall 2008). It was and is FAR better than the shitty windows media player version of streaming.

Perhaps netflix has found other methods of DRM that the studios approve of since fall 2008?

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#115

Post by chc »

duck wrote: post #57
nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: I have multiple relatives, including a police officer, who are dumb as a rock about how computers work, but through their friends have managed to pick up on how to use BitTorrent + Pirate Bay to pirate not only movies but music. And they see nothing wrong with this behavior, in an extremely conservative portion of Ohio; the same people who insist our President is a Muslim Kenyan. If this sort of use case ha…

That is what I was wondering since I hadn't really seen anyone outside of the tech world use it. So with that I can see it being a competitor, but then I wonder how do you compete with something that is illegal and not really an entity?

There are advantages to being able to afford centralized infrastructure. I can stream from Netflix. Downloading from Bittorrent means telling my girlfriend, "OK, we can start that movie in an hour if the download goes quickly." Blockbuster is more convenient than Bittorret in many cases.

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#116

Post by dhess »

elq wrote: post #113
dhess wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With silverlight, I can watch a 720p video on my mbp and use less than one core. I can not say the same for flash. A 720p video from Netflix? That definitely wasn't the case for me last time I tried, maybe 2 months ago. edit: to clarify, it's not even possible to stream 720p from Netflix on a Mac, regardless of how many cores it might take.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/52575/hd%20silverlight%20osx.png

OK, that's a lot nicer than it used to look. Apparently they enabled that in May.

I'm still not happy about needing to install Silverlight, but at least the quality is now comparable to what I get on my Xbox 360 and PS3.

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#117

Post by wvenable »

Vivtek wrote: post #94
avar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the U.S. so I can't spend a few bucks on Netflix. But your bad experience with BitTorrent is probably purely a function of using the wrong trackers. I have access to some trackers where the download very rarely goes below 2MB/s, with 5-8MB/s being the average. Some of these have material like discontinued music and foreign films that I could never get where I live, at least not without significant hassle.…

Well, but that's exactly what I'm talking about - P2P does provide a really useful service, and I use it, too, for the same reasons. It's just that all things considered, I'd rather pay somebody to do it for me, especially given that NetFlix is ridiculously cheap for the convenience it gives me. P2P is free in terms of money, but it's not at all free in terms of the effort you have to put into it to get reasonable, u…

I don't think your experience is really that common. First of all, I get most of my TV from bittorrent via RSS. I just subscribe and it's automatically on my harddrive ready to plan less than 24 hours after it aired with the commercials clipped out. No special sites required. No logins. No hassle at all.

For movies, same deal. As long the movie is out on DVD, I can find it in minutes from any popular search site and have it downloaded within 30 minutes. I've never had a bad result. As for RIAA, I do have an IP filter installed but even that was extremely easy.

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#118

Post by wvenable »

dkarl wrote: post #86
philwelch wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get access to those trackers, you generally have to be "cool enough", or know the right people, which for me is impossibly daunting.

Yes. Everything I found was junk; it was like Gnutella all over again. The last time I tried to download a movie torrent, it turned out to be porn of a type that I do not want on my hard drive. (That's why it was the last time.)

To me, that result seems really non-typical. For the majority of movies you're going to have hundreds of seeders -- they're not going to keep mislabeled movies-as-porn.

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#119

Post by dagw »

trunnell wrote: post #69
duck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what I was wondering since I hadn't really seen anyone outside of the tech world use it. So with that I can see it being a competitor, but then I wonder how do you compete with something that is illegal and not really an entity?

I wonder how do you compete with [BitTorrent] Netflix competes by being more convenient than BitTorrent. BT might be free, but it doesn't deliver TV shows and movies directly to your HDTV.

Actually it does if you know how to set it up. With the right setup you can subscribe to TV shows and have them waiting for you on your HTPC a few hours after they've aired for the first time anywhere in the world. Same with movies, pull simple up a web interface click a few movies you want to see and it's more often than not ready to watch 30-45 minutes later.

Re: NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company

#120

Post by Terretta »

dhess wrote: post #102
trunnell wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

For starters, it's a poor choice for streaming technology on the Mac. Can we expect to see HTML5 video support for the Mac anytime soon? It pains me that Netflix HD streams on my iPad look better than on my 1080p projector hooked up to a Mac mini.

Of course video using only 1024x768 tiny pixels on a bright glossy screen will look better than using 1920 x 1080 pixels from a projector. You simply won't see as many problems with video compression on the small screen with less pixels.

Also, just to clarify -- there's not really any such thing as HTML5 video. There's an HTML5 video tag, and browser vendors can decide what kinds of video the tag should handle in their browser on a given OS.

How the video looks on your iPad or projector depends on the compression/decompression algorithm ("codec") and how efficiently the playback software and hardware can decompress and render frames of video to your screen.

Silverlight and Flash both support the H.264 codec, meaning a given frame of video in either technology should look the same.

In desktop Safari, the HTML5 video tag ties into any media the installed version of QuickTime can play, including video compressed with H.264. The HTML5 video tag on iPad and iPhone 3G and later supports H.264 Baseline profile 3.1, while earlier versions of iPhone support H.264 Baseline profile 3.0.

Given that Silverlight, Flash, and QuickTime all play back an H.264 encoded video, the exact same file, differences stem from other things besides the video, like excessive CPU usage causing frame drops.

For example, Flash 10.0 didn't access hardware acceleration for decompression of H.264, so 720p or higher content would generally drop frames and stutter badly. Flash 10.1 can, with certain video cards, use the video card to decompress the video, letting the video play more smoothly.

Safari 5 and QuickTime also can access hardware acceleration.

Meanwhile, Silverlight 3 was much more efficient at decompressing and rendering 720p size video on a Mac than Flash 10.0, while also supporting DRM encryption/decryption, making the Silverlight player a natural choice for Netflix. (As of Flash 10.1, on compatible Macs, the situation has somewhat reversed.)

On the back end, Silverlight streaming servers and Apple adaptive HTTP servers are close enough that an IIS Media Services server can stream to iPhones/iPads. H.264 video encoded for Silverlight Smooth Streaming or for Apple adaptive HTTP streaming uses generally similar techniques, helping an investment in Silverlight pay off in reaching the Apple iDevice ecosystem.

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