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73% of Subscribers Would Download Netflix Content, Says Survey (allflicks.net)
An anonymous reader writes: A report surfaced a couple weeks ago suggesting Netflix is soon going to let users download videos for offline playback. AllFlicks decided to poll 1,000 stakeholders to see what they think of the bold new idea. In their survey, they asked respondents to tell them how important offline viewing was to them. Nearly two thirds of Netflix subscribers said offline support was either "Important" or "Very Important" to them. About a quarter of all respondents chose the most enthusiastic option, "Very Important." Just plain "Important" was the most popular answer, at 39%, and "Not Important" netted a significant minority at 34%. They followed up by asking subscribers if they think they will download Netflix videos if offline viewing becomes possible. The respondents agreed overwhelmingly that they would download Netflix videos if it became possible. A whopping 73% said they would, while only 16% were confident that they would not. In an open-ended question, AllFlicks asked when would they use the feature. Respondents said they'd need offline support when traveling (in particular, air and car travel), camping, and working out in the gym. They did also mention public transit and train commutes. In addition to offline playback, Recode reports that Comcast will allow Netflix onto its X1 platform.
Streaming = the movie is not stored on the device, requires an Internet connection to play.
Downloading = the movie is stored on the device, does not require an Internet connection to play.
Couldn't this help to reduce overall consumed bandwidth? I mean, set your local device / player to download the media overnight (or during the day, non-peak hours) and then watch during peak hours.
Sure, the same amount of bandwidth would be used, but it would make balancing the network usage a lot easier.
In theory, there could even be a setting along the lines of "low priority bandwidth consumption during x hours" or "media must be downloaded by y time". Even if 2-3 episodes in advance are cached, that could help.
And yet here I am with streams I captured years ago. Just because Netflix doesn't offer saving yet doesn't mean I didn't save it. It was stored on my computer, I just made it permanent.
Means you got a tap with running water but you don't have a bucket. Streaming IS Downloading !! you just need the right tools to save on disk.
When AT&T oversells their local infrastructure, there are definitely "peak hours"...
Bonus when they decide upgrading and maintaining it is pointless, and simply stop signing up new customers in the area.
I could use this a lot. I watch Netflix sometimes when camping using my phone as a hot spot. Gotta watch the data real close. If I could d/l the content I want to watch, say Marco Polo Season 2 like last weekend, I would consume more Netflix content.
But if has to be done correctly. It would have to allow playback on a device that is different from the device that d/l the content.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Hotels never have good enough bandwidth to watch Netflix. This could help!
Also considering the fact that Amazon has allowed this for at least two years with Prime Video, I don't see how it is considered "bild", if anything it is Netflix bowing to competitive pressure and playing catchup.
We both know that "streaming and downloading" both mean the data goes through your modem, but what happens to the data afterward is the difference between the two words here.
What you did is basically the same as renting a DVD and ripping it. You paid for a rental but made a permanent copy. That's not what you paid for.
Netflix is late to the game with this. Amazon Prime Video has allowed this for almost a year. The Starz App allows it. The more the merrier.
Also the difference between "can" and "can legally".
They don't "randomly" delete content from their catalog. It's the licenses that expire, but Netlifx doesn't give us any easy-to-access ways of finding out when the titles will expire.
Netflix so-called HD videos have a very low bit rate compared to Blu-ray.
Only 4-5 Mbps for Netflix vs 15-40 Mbps for Blu-ray.
Even though Netflix uses more modern compression algorithms, with that much difference in bit rate, the Netflix video looks significantly worse than Blu-ray, especially on a 106" projection screen in my home theater.
The audio also leaves much to be desired.
The difference will only get worse with the Ultra HD Blu-ray standard, which has 82 to 128 Mbit/s bit rate.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
73% of Subscribers Would Download Netflix Content, Says Survey
And 100% of torrent users already do.
I left AT&T U-Verse because of the caps but besides blocking IP6, this was definitely a problem where I am. Maximum throughput during the evenings was below the 3 Mbit/second of their slowest plan and usually below 1 Mbit/second. The actual error free link speed was like 27 Mbits/second.
You didn't pay Netflix for a permanent copy. That doesn't mean that you didn't pay someone else for one.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Unenforceable laws are bad for a country.
1) Adds noise to the pool of laws citizens should care about.
2) Makes citizens distrust the state.
3) Makes citizens used to "jump the law".
4) Makes the state look weak because it can't enforce it's own rules.
That's true for stuff with important to society implications: gambling, drug consumption, abortion, guns regulations, traffic laws.
Should be more so for stuff that society as whole doesn't give a shit about (like what I do on my network with my computers).
True, but just because you paid Walmart doesn't mean you paid Netflix. Maybe you paid for a standard def. copy, but you aren't entitled to an HD copy. Your DVD that you require a DVD player for is different from the stream that provides the convenience of the app on your TV. The regular movie is different from the director's cut, etc., etc....
Of course, it's not like you didn't pay for it in some form. But I don't know if there will ever be a standard mechanism for allowing ownership (licensing) of one version of something to justify no-price or reduced-price copying from some other source.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
People have had access to "offline content" for years. They're called "DVD's".
I don't respond to AC's.
If you have a kid, you have much bigger problems than slow internet connections on a plane.
Never to forget that the sneaker net is also far more bandwidth efficient. It takes only minutes to transfer over a whole terrabyte of content. As thumb drive capacity increases so the exchange of content over sneaker net will increase.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
In an online poll of existing clients, given a choice between "Yes", "Yes", and "No", roughly 2/3 of respondents answered "yes". Upper end (74% slightly above margin of error) may be attributable to people who don't subscribe (and cannot be polled) because it was important for them to access Netflix offline when they chose not to subscribe.
Gently reply
What more modern compression algorithms? Blu-Ray and Netflix use the same h.264 compression algorithm - Blu-Ray uses the high profile that runs at a high bit rate (typically 25Mbps average, but Blu-Ray can peak at 100Mbps). Maybe Netflix has better codecs that can do more with every bit, but unlikely.
In fact, Netflix is more like the "Digital Copy" download you can get - which can be aywhere from 2-8GB for the movie. And I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix acquires their video content direct in this way as the studios can tweak their encoders to better allocate the bits.
Audio is a big thing - on Blu-Ray they have lossless codecs that can run around 5Mbps with 7.1 surround ssound. Netflix has been using Dolby Digital+ (a slightly tweaked Dolby Digital format that either gives you better quality for the same bitrate, or the same quality at a lower bitrate). The only unfortunate thing is the DD+ bitrate is so low that older receivers that support DD+ may not be able to lock onto it. (It runs slower than DVD's 640kbps)
As for 4K, Netflix requires 25Mbps, and I think Netflix is also using the same HEVC codec that UHD Blu-Ray does. Though the main reason for UHD Blu-Ray is not 4K resolution (most movies are still presented in 2K format! Few are 4K) but HDR.
HEVC is about twice as efficient as h.264 - as in the same quality at half the bitrate. Blu-Ray used that coupled with BDXL style discs (33GB/layer) to achieve a quadrupling of pixels - using HEVC to halve the bitrate, and then a new disc format to double the disc space from 50 to 100GB, thus allowing 4K to be stored at the same quality.
My internet usage will drop significantly when the 80+ hours/w of Rescue Bots and iCarly my kids watch is stored locally on my device...
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
This seems to be true of Spain, curiously.
It's not true of the UK though.
I ride the D.C. Metro on a daily basis for at least 20 minutes at a time. LTE/3G availability occurs generally when you stop, and barely works if at all in between stops. If I could download..or Hell even CACHE 20 minutes of a show that would help a LOT. I'm not sure why Netflix will not allow it. I'm wondering if it would take having to re-write all their legal contracts with content providers.
Streaming = the movie is not stored on the device, requires an Internet connection to play. Downloading = the movie is stored on the device, does not require an Internet connection to play.
No internet connection you say?
Well, I'm glad YOU are confident that some bullshit cloud-enabled codec won't be "required" to play back licensed content like this.
I'm certainly not.
I had long ago thought that Netflix should do something to allow off-hours downloading to allow people to watch these shows during their normal evening hours. This would help ease the complaints that ISP's often voiced (and took action against) around the network being overused during prime time viewing hours. If a person could queue up a few movies or shows which they wanted to watch the next day, the system could download them overnight. This would also help improve the experience for people with slower internet connections in that the show would not experience delays during playback or suffer from quality degradation as the system compensates for lower bandwidth availability etc.
I assumed the major limitation for this would be around what licensing would allow Netflix to do. There would also be hardware changes required (for storage) but that could be addressed in future hardware refreshes for devices such as Apple TV etc.
As is usual in stupid arguments on the Internet about the meaning of words, I'm right and you're wrong. That's just how it is, always. You are probably thinking the same thing, as if you are the keeper of the language, instead of me! (Ok, do we all understand how stupid this flamewar is? Good. Now, let's have the flamewar.)
What you use to define "downloading" many of us call "saving" (or possibly "recording" if the data arrives by means other than IP, such as an OTA TV antenna, camera/microphone, etc). Downloading is what happens in both scenarios. In one scenario, it is "saved" to local media, and in another scenario, it isn't. That second one (where you elect to use the data immediately and don't save it), we call streaming (if the data is AV), but it's viewed as a special case within downloading, not a separate and distinct thing from downloading.
There are a lot of reasons that computer-oriented people use this terminology, but it basically comes down to the fact that we use various programs to get things, where that program doesn't care what happens to the data after it is transported. curl and wget are curl and wget regardless of if you save the data for many years, or just save it to a ramdisk for just a few seconds prior to deleting it, or if you pipe curl right into some other program's stdin eithout ever writing to a file at all. In all these use cases, curl downloaded the data.
That you anti-computer media people would barge into computer peoples' domain and think you can change the meaning of words, has many ha-- oops, you already took "hacker." Well, then: NEVER AGAIN!!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The report of this survey sound very much like advertising for Netflix. I remember a time when companies would quietly take a survey and then use the results to direct their company. I wouldn't even hear the boring details of the survey until the product came out with a proper news release.
I need this with the state of rural broadband in Canada being as poor as it is. With Netflix's track record of introducing services in the US first and a shittier version everywhere else whenever they get around to it, I'm not holding my breath.
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Systems Administrators: We read the manual so you don't have to.
Get rid of that as well, and you'll see the count of torrented movies drop significantly.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."