Netflix launches 3D and SuperHD through specific ISPs - Page 3

I have split schedule at work when I come home at 11:15 PM some nights Netflix easily has 25 times more content that I want to watch than anything on my 200 channels of cable. Even with on demand content I still watch Netflix 20:1 over cable. Cable is free as it is part of the HOA fees where I live (and I pay a small $8 a month for HD channels) I can see the anger of people that pay $8 and watch Netflix more than cable. I find it almost laughable that people still stop whatever they are doing to sit down in front of the TV at exactly 8 PM on the dot to watch scheduled programming. To each his own......

I can't find any 3D content on NETFLIX... just the "SuperHD" logos on most movies.

My ISP provider is on the list, download bandwidth is not a problem, NETFLIX 3D Bluray player, Is there a particular feature you have to search?

I think Netflix is great. My wife and I don't have nor want to have cable TV. Between Netflix, my collection of DVDs, BD, 3D BD, and OTA TV were just fine. There is so much stuff to watch just via streaming alone on Netflix that I'll never be able to see it all. I'm glad to see they are adding SHD and 3D to the mix.

It depends, if you are fine being behind on TV series its a great way to get your content. For movies its way behind redbox even and every time I think about watching a movie from the past its MIA.

I'm not sure why I pay for it. I'm going to cancel my Netflix right now, I've been buying Blu Ray or else streaming from Vudu. If I wanted TV, I'd pay for cable and an on-demand DVR.

edit - I just cancelled Netflix, thanks to this thread lol.

Edited by imagic - 1/17/13 at 9:16am

First, anyone paying $80+ for cable could be (and very often IS) a fool. But of course paying that much for DirecTV or cable would be, well, stupid, IMO. I pay HALF of that and get ALL of my local sports, a side tier of pay movie channels, and an INFINITELY larger array of tv shows and movies. Simple as that. "But it's just $8!"

Quality? Joke #2. Netflix teeters between completely and utterly dreadful to "good" with the lions share of programming FIRMLY residing in or near the former (yep, that's with my WIDE-OPEN 25 mbps service on a ps3, appletv, and BD player). "But it's just $8!"

Reality: Netflix's content offering and quality do not NEARLY make it worth the $8 to the VAST majority of people who try it. ~20 million vs 100+ million different trials. "But it's just $8!"

Last, internet forum threads can politely spur into TOPICAL sub-dialogues that are still beneficial to the thread and community, on the whole. So you can squash the dramatic wannabe stab at me like I brought up Lance Armstrong or a good recipe for buffalo chicken dip.

"another way to consume media"

Ummmm, well, sure. AT A COST.

And when it's "just $8!!!" and millions happily walkaway anyway, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to surmise that somethings REALLY missing.

Go figure.

James

For such a non-controversal topic, we are getting a fair amount of ppl reportings posts. Please stop the snarky comments. I think we all have better things to do (like following the Manti Teo story), then babysitting this thread.

Ron

Sorry all...bit juvenile on my part.

James

TWC in talks with Netflix over Super HD and 3D...great, they are my ISP. If it is like the last time at had Netflix over a year ago, there was no content there that me or my wife cared about. Most of my friends use Netflix to keep their kids occupied.

With VZ FiOS hooking up with redbox, I highly doubt they will join Netflix's CDN....Just stating the obvious... but sucks when I'm sitting on a 50mb down pipe.....

Sorry but I'm a Canadian Netflix user and I've had super HD movies showing up all week. Looks great too.

I'm on Cogeco with a 30Mbit feed.

I have Optimum/Cablevision and watched Seal Team Six last night in Super HD. It is so sharp that it looks a bit digital. My set up is JVC HD350 with Dabee which I need to dial it down from 60 to 50.

Yes, audio is still 5.1.

What a crock. Single-digit Mbps shouldn't even be called "HD", let alone "super HD."

Basically, Netflix reduced their video quality a few months ago, and now they're re-offering their less-pathetic quality under a ridiculous and fraudulent name.

Bell Canada is part of Netflix Open Connect.
I can confirm I'm watching Super HD streams (1080p / DD5.1) through an AppleTV gen3.
They look far better than Bell FibeTV and Rogers Cable.

Certain movies such as "Hugo" were near Blu-Ray quality; they seemed to be direct-from-master-encode-into-1080p with no recompression steps that happens very frequently. Unlike most Netflix material, for "Hugo", not once I saw a single compression artifact (not even in sky, water, snow, gradients) for that specific movie at 2:1 viewing distance to screen width for a flat panel TV. I had to move up to 1:1 screen width (projector setup league) and intentionally paying attention to compression artifacts, which I'm pretty familiar with in the torture-test material, only to see them faintly. "Hugo" was still very watchable. 25Mbps connection (Bel FibeTV 16+ subscription; which boosts to 25Mbps if all TV's are turned off). Buffering took only 5 seconds and it started playing straight into 1080p with no low-quality rampup. Bandwidth meter showed about 6+ gigabytes consumed after the movie ended, so it appears I was getting top bitrate (I changed Netflix preferences to use max bitrate).

Alas, most content on Netflix are crap. Still worth the $8/mo even even if just three movies a month, since the picture quality is significantly better than Bell FibeTV and Rogers Cable, and closed captioning on Netflix Canada is now widespread (finally!) since I am deaf; unlike Bell VOD which is rarely captioned. The caption fonts on AppleTV is also much better too, and I don't need to jump through hoops to watch something reasonably appealing at a random time (channel flipping, scheduling stuff for PVR's, keeping season passes/series records updated, etc). Netflix used to be terrible for keeping things closed captioned in Canada, but captioning for the deaf is much better now.

The random access nature of Netflix is more important to some people than PVR-scheduling or channel flipping. Some of us don't watch (much) sports, for example. Although USA Netfix has more content, surprisingly Canada Netflix has more TV shows. (I was surprised to find obscure episodes of FlashForward, for example!). I mainly keep a TV subscription because I like NatGeo and Discovery, and my spouse likes HGTV. We watch less than 10 hours of television/movies a week, and our schedules are busy, so the conveniently random-access nature of Netflix (with a good GUI like Boxee, AppleTV, etc) has suddenly become surprisingly more important than the amenities of a cable box, ever we first really started using recently. Click, click, watch. Shows go directly into better-than-cable-1080p less than 5 seconds after pressing play (quick buffer delay). We were surprised to find that the social aspect showed that it is faster to choose Netflix content to play, than to channel-flip(or scroll PVR recordings) through our Bell FibeTV. Unexpected factor -- Lower "spousal frustration" factor; how is that not worth $8, especially if the picture is better than cable? In the AppleTV gen3 UI (and presumably, any good GUI of any other good Netflix player), the ratings system in Netflix, combined with the fancy cover pictures, plus detailed information, and reasonably accurate predictions of what you like to watch. Some things are quite limiting, and annoying, but the convenience-per-dollar and quality-per-dollar is rather good (as I'm on the Netflix Open Connect and get all the "better-than-cable-even-if-not-BluRay" SuperHD goodness now). Some features that certain U.S. carriers have a series "Catch Up" feature tantamount to VOD giving access to all previous episodes of the current TV show you're watching on the current channel. We'd love that feature, but we don't get that on our FibeTV (yet).

Again, I've avoided Netflix for many years until recently, for two reasons -- video and captions.

I'm deaf and need captions -- and I'm a guy that picks Blu-Ray over DVD -- I can tell apart 720p and 1080p at 2:1 view-distance-vs-screen-width. The picture quality finally consistently crossed the "better than cable TV" line. Not Blu Ray quality. Albiet darn nearly for some. (at least for movies like "Hugo" that look as if it is encoded direct from masters). But good enough for $8. I'm on the Netflix Open Connect so it appears I'm now consistently getting the best bitrates, even on the first second of playback with only a very short buffering delay. The showstoppers considerations are solved for me now. (Rough estimate: 90% of what I'm interested on Netflix now seems to have captions. This used to be less than 50%) And since we're 10-hour-a-week watchers, the bandwidth cap is manageable (for now -- knock on wood).

P.S. Tip....If you have Bell FibeTV, demand a Sagecom router. The Cellpipe routers are crap.
P.P.S. Never use WiFi for streaming Netflix to your TV. Connect that Ethernet cable to your AppleTV, Boxee, or whatever.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 1/17/13 at 2:28pm

How do you find the 3D movies?

I search for 3D, but none of them are actually in 3D.

+1!

Amen!

Ed

Thanks for that.

Ed

That appears a bit odd to me - obviously, there is compression, however with my 12Mbps connection, I rarely drop down in quality. Perhaps some QoS in your router?

I wonder how much Microsoft is paying Netflix to support this capability on Windows 8 as a mechanism to support the extremely poor sales of Win 8 outside of OEM ditribution.

I know of no one who is "upgrading" to Win 8 since it's such a user disaster compared to a move from 7. I suspect this is a means to generate more upgrades.

Of course we all know that this could work just as well on Windows 7. Gotta love artificial limitations for the sake of increasing sales.

Re: Single-digit Mbps shouldn't even be called "HD"
Yes, it should if it's broadcast in MPEG4 which I believe Netflix uses. Their content is far cleaner than the average 17mb my cable provider averages using the MPEG2. Their programs are rife with macroblocking and mosquito noise - something I never see on Netflix.
I agree quality has slipped a bit. I used to get XFineHD Netflix content which just sparkled and looked occasionally as good as some of my Blu-Rays (E.g. Dreamworks cartoons). Now it only goes up to FineHD which looks like typical cable but WITHOUT the constant artifacts!
I'm with Shaw in Canada and they, unfortunately, still broadcast most content in MPEG2.

When I read Netflix was going to stream "SuperHD" I thought...cool, something higher than 1080p! Then I read what it meant and I'm just mad at Netflix and their marketing department now. Epic PR fail at least as far as I'm concerned. And 5 Mb/second? I have audio tracks on some Blu's that require more bandwidth than that. I wish they'd put something higher quality out that would take advantage of at least 10 Mb/s or even 15 Mb/s as those are pretty common speeds these days.

Dan, You might be suffering from router "buffer bloat"... google that term, and see that it might not be your provider, but your router have too MUCH memory... go figure. I hacked my router firmware with DD-WRT and solved a lot of my streaming video troubles (when all the other "QoS' tweaks and things didn't help much).

Dan Hitchman:

And they still think 7 Mbps is adequate for quality 1080p??? And streaming is the future of UHD content with no physical media disc?? They must be smoking some great stuff around the offices of Netflix and Sony!

I have 25 Mbps (with spikes on good days of 37 Mbps) from Concast (again, the "n" is intentional) and regular HD Netflix content sometimes drops down to high SD or fluctuates.

To add to this, there is no encoder nor bit rate specification for HD. HD is just the transmission format spec. Encoding is another piece of the equation and there are several encoders out there. The newer encoders the more efficient the compression. MPEG-4 is more efficient than MPEG 2 for instance. You can't really compare content quality based on bitrates alone unless they were using the same encoder.

Somehow, I am getting SuperHD bitrates that appear significantly higher than what Netflix's old XHighHD got. Router data meter also measured 6 gigabytes for a SuperHD movie. Is it because I'm on the Netflix Open Connect Network?

Agreed on your other points.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 1/17/13 at 2:28pm

SuperHD added a top bitrate of 7Mbit/s.

Aha, that explains it.
My router data meter is consistently showing 6GB-6.5GB per flagship movie, which translates to 7Mbit/sec according to my calculator.
These are in H.264 format (Besides, AppleTV gen3 does not support VC-1)

Certain movies in particular, "Hugo", seemed (to my eyes) to be a direct-from-master Netflix encode. I wonder how close Netflix is getting to the masters nowadays. I would not be surprised if a direct-from-master (no recompress steps) encode with a very good multi-pass encoder at 7Mbit/sec looks better than a lot of the early MPEG2 encodes put on older Blu-Ray's (less than 20 Mbps) and ATSC 19Mbps material compressed using a single-pass realtime MPEG2 encoder.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 1/17/13 at 2:48pm

i can't ever imagine streaming a movie. i invested $$$'s of money into my system I have a hard time thinking that streaming would ever be as good as sliding a blue ray into a oppo player. maybe in 15 years we will be able to stream a 108-p movie but in 15 years we will have 4k. will netflix networks be ready to stream 4k?

Amen to that. I finally picked up a BDP (Sony BDP-S590) that streams Netflix 1080p/DD+ and completely agree that WiFi is a waste of time. I picked up the NetGear Powerline home theatre kit for $79.99 from Newegg to connect via Ethernet directly from my den to the Internet router upstairs using the electrical wires in my house. Now getting consistent HD from Netflix. I have FIOS so no chance of leveraging this supposedly better service but I don't really care since I'm thoroughly enjoying what they currently have to offer.

From the Netflix Support website:

Netflix now offers 3D streaming for select titles with the following devices:

• Sony PlayStation 3 (connected TV must support 3D)
• LG TV Series: LM6200, LM6400, LM6600, LM6650, LM6700, LM7600, LS5700, LS5750, PM4700, PM6700, PM6900, PM9700
• Additional device support coming soon!

Thus no Bluray player can stream 3D content from Netflix yet.


Actually, Super HD has two bitrates: 4300 and 5800 kbps. Add to that 384 kbps for multichannel audio and you get a maximum of 6185 kbps.

I have the same problem here with Charter cable although I have serious doubts that it is the cable system. I regularly measure 25-27mbps but Netflix often drops down or fluctuates, especially at night.