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Netflix Will Explore Mobile-Specific Cuts of Its Original Series (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said in a briefing today with journalists in San Francisco that the company plans to explore streaming mobile-specific cuts of its original movies and TV shows, to satisfy what he said was a growing audience of mobile Netflix watchers. "It's not inconceivable that you could take a master [copy] and make a different cut for mobile," Hunt said. To date, Netflix hasn't been delivering different cuts for different viewing platforms, Hunt said, but "it's something we will explore over the next few years." The idea would be to create a version of the content with scenes or shots that are more easily visible or immersive on a mobile phone, since certain shots can be hard to see or can appear diminished on a relatively small phone screen.
Do you want to lose subscribers? Because that's how you lose subscribers.
They better have a opt out option!
So are they going to consider the Roku and Amazon Fire and similar devices to be "mobile devices"? Because a lot of people use these devices to output via HDMI to their TVs. That doesn't seem right to give these users different content just because they're not using a computer as their primary output device.
My TV is on the other side of the room. My cell phone I hold close to my head when watching TV. Guess which fills more of my vision?
I agree. Imagine if Amazon removed paragraphs from the eBook versions to make it easier/faster to read? Different cuts of TV shows and movies that depends on the viewing device is a bad idea.
However, if all they're talking about is different cropping for smaller devices, i.e. to make it easier to see details/action/characters on the small screen, then it's not really that different from a 16:9 movie cropped to 4:3. Sure you're missing parts of the image, but it's not a different cut.
I'm 40 and the only time I've noticed cropping removed important information was the ending scene of The Fifth Element, where you see the moon in the 16:9 version but not in the 4:3 version. The implied information was that our current moon was another evil sphere that was stopped thousands of years ago and the new now-also-dead evil sphere became a second moon. Removing that bit of information kind of ruined the ending for those who watched in 4:3.
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Buried in the original article is a mention that these statements were made during a two-day event Netflix held together with Dolby Laboratories, centered around High Dynamic Range video (e.g., Dolby Vision).
Maybe these out-of-context statements really mean "If we're filming a show in Dolby Vision and it has a lot of really dark scenes, maybe we should make a mobile version that brightens up the shadows a bit so that it's not a murky mess on a glossy mobile-phone screen under who-knows-what lighting conditions?" The Dolby Vision spec can adjust the dynamic range to meet the capabilities of the viewing device... if the device has a Dolby-manufactured ASIC. It sounds like Netflix is considering how to offer mobile users the option of a server-side tweak to do something similar.
That would actually be a good thing, especially if the user had the option to select "normal" or "mobile optimized" versions.
I have a Dolby Vision-equipped TV. Netflix has several shows filmed in Dolby Vision. Many, like Daredevil, have very dark cinematography. It looks incredible on a Dolby Vision TV under controlled lighting... but you're definitely missing stuff on an iPhone under commercial lighting. Bumping the darks up a notch or two to compensate would not be a terrible thing.