HDTV Almanac - Home Network Sales Slow Down

[alfredpoor]

Ah, the brave new world of home entertainment. Streaming video across high-speed broadband connections will cause legions of viewers to cut their cable cords (and satellite cords, except that satellites don’t have cords). HDTVs, Blu-ray players, video game consoles, and even digital picture frames have wired and wireless connections to home networks, opening up a [...]

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[brewster]

[quote]take a few minutes to show it off [/quote]

IMHO doing that wound convince people it's pretty bad...seriously though, I've found on-line streaming to be barely unwatchable in terms of picture quality/playback quality (over compressed, dropped frames, etc) when viewed on the "big screen" (only 42" in my case, connected to a recent vintage PC). I have only tried things where I didn't have to pay (like hulu, for example), but I can't see why pay service would be better. Ones like NetFlix doesn't seem to offer a simple way to try without signing up - what are they afraid of?

I have a FioS connection with 20mbit speed (I find I easily get >16 mbit at all times).

The only consistent success I've had is for things where I can download the content; local playback is fine and in those cases the bit rate is high enough for a decent image (I use Big Buck Bunny and Elephant's Dream as my reference as to what to expect for interent media - and with those people *are* impressed at the quality).

If I'm going to pay for content I expect (for cases where the source has it) delivered in 5.1 format. Doesn't seem like anyone does that yet?

I know people post that they watch streamed content "all the time" - but there's also people that think 64 kbit mp3 sounds good too...

It's clearly getting better than it used to be. OTOH if someone has recommendations for streaming sites where the HD quality is really there I'm all for trying - I kind of gave up a while ago and just ignore the stuff now...maybe I jumped in too early.