If you’ve read my past post’s you’ll know I am an avid cord cutter and have been a Netflix aficionado for a few years now. I am also a big Apple fan and love my AppleTV and combined these two bring together much happiness for me. Recently Apple TV added HBOGO to their line up of available “Channels” and I jumped in head first, however HBO has been missing some points that I feel a well established company entering a well established market with well established technology should not be experiencing. The trouble first presented itself with the season finale of True Detective and the complete collapse of HBOGO which plenty has been said about.
However I was recently on vacation in Key West and of course my wife and I had to keep up with Game of Thrones so I rigged our really small Condo TV up to my MacBook Pro and patched the audio into the Sony HTIB (home theater in a box) system and sat on the couch and watched Season 4 Episode 4 , Oathkeeper. The stream was good, which with my speed test pegging out at 100mbps I should hope so. It was so much better than what we experience at home I began to get agitated. Why? Why was this so much better?
I got back to the house and decided to look into our video stream quality and our actual speed numbers. Our internet is a mediocre 30mbps/5mbps Comcast package which if you do a 2wire sustained speed test turns a 2.5mbps constant stream speed which by standard basic math equates to approximately 2,250 Megabytes of transferred information per 2 hour movie. Woefully short of the 5Gbps +/- of a compressed .M4V HD movie file. This leads me to the real problem Compression.
Compression is how big files get small and how Netflix is able to out stream HBOGO. Netflix is currently using compression technology from a company called EyeIO. With this technology they are able to compress a 720p file down to a size that can be easily transmitted over a 1.8mbps constant stream. Click here to see How it Works. In development are new compression algorithms that will be used for 4K TV broadcast and streaming, watch for these on Netflix soon. Unfortunately until new compression techniques are developed those watching HBOGO or Netflix on a narrower bandwidth will suffer from poor video quality. In the case of HBOGO without a robust 100Mbps connection you are left to suffer with bad compression artifacts and terrible definition. The only way around this is with faster internet… Lets get on that ISP’s! All I can hope for is Google Fiber to come to Jacksonville soon because I know Comcast isn’t about to spread any love unless you happen to be a stock holder.
-Phil
