Comment by Gander5739
13 hours ago
I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.
The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix.
> I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.
They might not care but anyone who literally can't tell the difference of a good 4K source and a 1080p source on an appropriate display needs to go see an eye doctor. But that most people don't care about quality also isn't particularly shocking.
And as gp indicated, quality isn't just about the encode resolution and bitrate but also about the master itself. Unfortunately not all directors and companies behind great movies have the resepect for their creations that it deserves and the current release which might be the only release on streaming platforms might have significant flaws such as unwanted cuts/restorations, missing audio tracks, replaced sound effects, inaudible mixes, missing subtitles, bad upscales, excessive denoising, reframing from the original aspect ratio that cuts of content and/or shows parts of the originally captured film frames that were never meant to be seen, or various other "enhancements".