Man... Im watching Stargate sg1 with my kiddo. My Plex server is down for a bit.. so I switched over to prime for an episode or two..

It's dark, it's audio is horrible, it's 4:3 formatted it's horribly compressed and it has commercials.

Talk about a poor viewing experience.

Not watching is better than watching...

The tradeoff kinda made sense at the dawn of streaming, when the transaction was basically trading quality for better pricing and convenience.

Nowadays? Yeaaaaah I don't know about that chief

Crazy to think that we lost all the advantages that streaming offered, kept all the disadvantages, piled on a few more disadvantages on top of that, and people went "sure that makes sense 24 bucks a month worth it bro"

streaming just has godawful UX now as well. the apps play you commercials while in the menu, you have to worry about buffering, you aren't allowed to take screenshots (which is the most numbskulled DRM i've ever seen; they allowed it in the old days and everything was fine AND either way people have ALREADY managed to rip and share the raw footage. what's the point??), 75% of the fucking content on amazon you have to pay an extra fee for, media appears and disappears at the whim of pigheaded suits, prices go up every 6 months because fuck you, the blindingly stupid netflix 'single family home' restriction....

watching tv is meant to be fun, not introduce a whole other layer of bureaucratic bullshit into our lives

Maybe I'm blind, maybe it's me viewing this on a phone, but I legitimately can't tell the difference.

Yeah, if the streaming providers ever switch over to AV1 that would be an interesting comparison.

Depends where you get your alternatively-sourced shows from. Downloaded a torrent yesterday that was so dark that I could barely see anything even with my screen's brightness turned all the way up. Downloaded another torrent of the same episode, and it was much easier to see everything.

The big difference for me is the audio quality.

Hard to tell a difference on my phone, so I'm assuming most people won't care.

But isn't the "alternatively sourced" a rip from Amazon prime?

But indeed on my Android tv if I use Amazon prime most of times it decides to use 720p with a low bitrate

I have a story, so I get wanting great video quality and why people get remuxes, but I have a friend who is borderline legally blind. His vision is so poor that he has to wear contacts and glasses at the same time. He has to get the remux version of things and complains about minor encoding artificacts from versions of things with smaller file sizes that I feel wouldn't bother 99.9% of the population. Hell years ago, before he got an updated prescription, he was driving and he mentioned how bad his vision was getting and I asked him if he could read the license plate for the car stopped in front of us and he laughed and said no. Anyway, I feel like the extra quality is wasted on him. He's like an audiophile who is hard of hearing. I just find this funny and wanted to share.

Yup.

Canceled my Prime sub a month ago when they announced they were going to make people pay more to stay add free.

It's the high seas for me.

Wow that is absolutely ridiculous, thanks for sharing

It's wider?