Bandwidth Upgrade = Netflix Rocks, But...

After garnering a roughly 2x increase in my DSL connection’s downstream bandwidth on Saturday night, you might have thought that the first thing I’d do is fire up my Apple TV and test the service’s high-def progressive download capabilities under the faster tether. I did fire up Apple TV, in fact, but call me a cheapskate…nothing available at the time prompted me to pull out my wallet and pay the $3.99-$4.99 HD rental price tag.

Instead, I decided to take fuller advantage of a service I was already paying for, i.e. my Netflix subscription. When I last wrote about the company’s streamed Watch Now (aka Watch Instantly) service, it had per-month usage time limits depending which grade of rental service a subscriber was paying for. Specifically, back in early January I said:

Granted, there aren’t a lot of brand new blockbusters available via Watch Now, but the selection is still quite impressive. The quality’s decent, too, albeit not the equal of a DVD…at least not at the moment. I’ll be curious to observe how, and how fast, Netflix uses Watch Now (as I strongly suspect is the company’s long-term plan) to wean folks off optical discs and onto online content distribution.

Call me psychic or, if you prefer, psychotic but just ten days later (and on the eve of the Apple TV Take 2 rollout), Netflix removed the streaming-time limits on all accounts save the cheapest plan option. Regarding my above quality comment, recall that when I’d last used the service I was on a ~1.3 Mbps (peak) DSL link. Watch Now delivers three quality tiers, automatically controlled by the Internet Explorer browser plug-in that you install the first time you access the service:

I suspect that when I previously auditioned Watch Now, I was viewing material at a mix of Basic and Good quality tiers, depending on LAN and WAN congestion at the time. Now, in contrast, I consistently connect at High Quality, and the results are very impressive on my Dell Inspiron 700m laptop VGA-tethered to a 28" 1920×1200 pixel LCD. So far, I’ve watched three movies; the two-part Grindhouse series (Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof) and the black-and-white The Good German. All are (coincidentally…I didn’t plan this in advance) excellent video quality testbeds.

As the ‘Grindhouse’ name implies, Rodriguez and Tarantino intentionally inserted digitally-rendered ‘flaws’ throughout both movies to ‘age’ them and otherwise give them the feel of low-budget films of the 70’s and 80’s. The grain, scratches and other blemishes represent challenging ‘noise’ for a lossy video codec. Similarly, the high-contrast and luminance-exclusive characteristics of The Good German accentuate any lossy compression artifacts, especially along sharp luma transition edges. Given my admittedly un-statistical sampling of the Watch Now library, Microsoft’s Windows Media Video codec (which is what Netflix uses, in combination with Windows Media DRM, therefore the Internet Explorer requirement) excels with this service.

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