Net Neutrality Fairytales

[phantom power]

I think there are many hate-able, evil scenarios enabled by a break from net neutrality.

But I have a question mostly tangential to that. This particular scenario assumes that there's a large demand for 4K. The entire existence of 4K leaves me scratching my head a little. We have already reached the point, at 1080p, where people complain about it being too easy to see people's pores and contact lenses. I buy all my video at Standard Def, because it looks totally fine to me and why burn the extra $15 for the next season of Walking Dead? I'm trying to understand the 4K use case, even for a hard core AV-o-phile. Is it to see those mites that live on the actors' eyelashes? Is it for people who can afford a two-meter TV, and they want to get up close to it without seeing pixels?

The big wired Internet providers are swearing up and down that yesterday’s net neutrality ruling, which threw out an Obama Administration rule requiring wired providers to treat all network traffic equally, won’t change the way they do business. That ruling was in an appeals court, which means the Supremes will either take the case or the ruling will stand.

Those providers, who are almost all cable companies, are full of shit, because with their lagging TV business, they’re all scrambling to find ways to (a) kill off Netflix and substitute their own streaming offering and (b) charge hefty usage-based pricing for their internet service, which has roughly 95% profit margins already. Here’s how they’ll do it:

The coming of “4K” streaming, which is a super high definition stream on next generation TVs, will use 3-4 times the amount of bandwidth that today’s high definition streams use. 4K users will blow out the caps that providers like Comcast have in place, opening the door for the cable boys to charge premium premium for users who have 4K TVs.

The streaming services of the cable providers will be exempt from the bandwidth caps, so users who don’t want to pay more for bandwidth will have an incentive to switch to Comcast’s version of Netflix.

Streaming providers who want to sell video to customers without busting the caps will be allowed to provide what AT&T Wireless calls “Sponsored Data”. This means that the streaming company will pay the cable company for the bandwidth their subscriber uses. The streaming company will pass on that cost to the consumer. (Note that AT&T can provide “Sponsored Data” without regulatory issues because wireless is exempt from net neutrality regulation.)

That’s the plan, they’re executing it slowly but with grinding efficiency, and the roadblocks the Obama Administration are throwing up in their path are getting overruled. And, by the way, they won’t be investing in their aging infrastructure, except in places where Google or some other fiber optic provider starts competing with them. This is how corporatism will make slowly but surely leave us in the dust behind countries that make Internet access a national priority.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/01/15/net-neutrality-fairytales/

[d_r]

1. Honestly

I would like it, especially on bigger screens. But I like visually striking things.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

2. 35mm film is higher definition than 1080p.

If you go to a movie theater, you are watching a film in higher definition than 1080. Film has much more information per frame. 4K has been long considered (it's existed in professional circles for at least 10 years) the digital equivalent of film.

I've shot on 35mm and 16mm (16mm is perfect for transferring to 1080, and a lot of hi-def productions were shot on 16mm before broadcast quality hi-def cameras and their respective media became more affordable). When I shot on 35mm, it was transferred via telecine to 4k, and from there dropped down to 1080 so we could actually edit it (in 2004, editing 4k wasn't the easiest things to do with a Power Mac G5).

The complaints about high def being able to see pores and contact lenses was pretty much bunk. Newscasters made jokes about having to use new make up. None of that was true.
With that said, there's a HUGE difference the final product between standard def and high def.

[phantom power]

3. True, I *can* easily see the difference between standard def (760p?) and 1080p

Oddly, the 1080p looks... over sharp to me. Of course, I grew up on crappy tube TVs at 480i, so my 46-inch flat screen still seems a bit miraculous. Your points about movie theaters suggest that large screen size is a factor in wanting higher def.

Based on your post, I predict you fall into the super-AV-o-phile category. It would be a mistake for me to project my own prefs onto The World, but I still suspect that we are passing the knee of the curve in terms of how many people are really pining for ever-increasing resolution. Could be wrong. Also, get off my lawn.

come to think of it, I believe my memory of contact lenses was actually from a movie reviewer's comments about seeing Ian McKellen's contacts in The Hobbit, which was shot on 64mm(!), if I recall

[Dr Hobbitstein]

8. Actually, not a super-AV-ophile...

I just majored in film/video production in college.

I like movies, I just don't spend exorbitant amounts of money on crazy gear. Hell, I adopted the HDTV just 4 years ago. Long after it had become standard.

And yeah, 64mm is ultra hi resolution. They use that for IMAX films.

That extra sharpness that you refer to could easily be the higher frequency rates coupled with "enhancements" that some modern TVs have. I turn that shit off.

[Silent3]

4. For some common screen sizes and typical viewing distances, even 1080p can be overkill

You'll need a really BIG screen, or you'll have to sit uncomfortably close to a smaller screen, to be able to resolve the difference 1080p and 4K video.

In our living room, we have a 50" plasma screen. At the time we bought this (over 5 years ago), 1080-line vertical resolution added a good bit to the price of a TV. I calculated that at the viewing distance we'd have, the extra resolution would be barely visible, if at all. We settled for a 720p model and saved hundreds of dollars. (A typical person with good vision can only resolve visual details of around one arc minute (a sixtieth of a degree, about one thirtieth of the distance across a full moon). Details provided by pixels much smaller than one arc minute won't be visible.)

We've also got a home theater with a video projector. That's projecting onto a 110" screen, and there 1080p and Blu-ray definitely makes a difference -- plain old DVD doesn't look terrible, but it's definitely a bit soft and fuzzy looking. The projector actually can simulate 4K resolution, but that's more important for not losing 1080p details as the picture is scaled and adjusted for projection geometry issues. Even at 110", I don't think I'd gain much from 4K program material.

I certainly can't see myself eagerly replacing old Blu-rays with 4K discs the way I've replaced many old DVDs. As for streaming content -- I'm still not a big fan of only being able to rent videos, I don't think 4K streaming will be all that reliable for a while (even 1080i or 1080p streaming stalls and sputters a bit sometimes), and I'm certainly not a fan of the Brave New World favored by the "content providers" where "buying" a movie only means one person/one household has a less-than-fully-guaranteed right to stream a movie from a remote server owned by a particular company for only so long as that company survives and/or sees fit to keep supplying that movie.

[FarCenter]

5. +1

480 line TV was engineered so that the lines were not visible to a person of normal vision more than 4 times picture height away.

With 1080, you can sit up to within 2 times picture height.

It's not clear why you want to move your chair up to within 1 times picture height with 2160 line video.

[JCMach1]

6. 4K? Most the country still has trouble with getting enough speed to stream Netflix

don't even get me started on Wireless data speeds... I want to slap someone when I think of getting great 3G over most of Kenya and the freaking coverage in States...

Most of America is still wired for 1999, not 2014... Another great reason to enforce net neutrality.

[hunter]

7. I'm happy with DVDs.

16 : 9 progressive scan with stereo audio is fine with me.

I'll even watch old videotapes and do not feel particularly motivated to purchase the DVD. Our digital television does a remarkable job of interpolation, tapes look better than they ever did on a CRT. (Of course the top-of-the-line VCR I bought in a thrift store for $10 probably does its share of the work.)

I think I'm always more interested in the storytelling than the screen resolution. Movies with glorious visuals but crappy storytelling simply irritate me.

It's possible to create a wonderful story on 8mm film.

Maybe it's because I'm a bookish person. My imagination is well practiced filling in the unseen.

This may also explain my fascination with crappy cameras. It's the imperfections of a media and their incorporation into the art that charm me.

I've been on the internet a long time. My first modem was 300 baud so maybe I still see the internet as a primarily text medium. Pictures, sound, and VCR quality video are simply candy to me. I have a dsl connection that started out as a dry "alarm-line" connection to a local ISP. I'm still using the same local ISP, and AT&T is clearly irritated by this whenever one of their technology upgrades disrupts my service (there's probably a note on my line "grumpy old fart legacy connection" or something like that...) But I've no motivation to upgrade anything.

I don't pay any attention at all to cable, satellite or broadcast television, nor will I pay for them.

It's quite possible my expectations of the internet will always fall between the cracks and I will generate negligible traffic on a highway dominated by people watching high resolution movies.

Nevertheless I think the internet should be a common carrier service with rates based on the capacity of the pipe.

I also think it's past time for a free national wireless internet, and the localization of broadcast radio and television. Anybody ought to be able to launch a community television or radio station, or a worldwide web site. The capacity of a free national internet ought to be enough to handle phone calls too, but probably not video. Unfortunately such a network would compete directly with cell and land-line phone providers and therefore isn't viable within our current political system which is loathe to nationalize any public service, even something like health care that everyone uses.