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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I remember having to wait at a friend's flat in 2004, that only had a 56K line. For the average webpage, online chat and even occasional mp3 download it felt alright. Not sluggish, not cringey, not anger triggering.

It's also a maturity thing. At one point 1) you're not chasing new "needs" 2) you know how much a few buys you.

I keep seeing people asking for optic fiber I'm going wild. Turns out they all want multiple HD streaming and 50GB Steam games (I wonder if Steam is has lazy game content streaming somewhere...). It's a fad luxury. Not long ago I think we would have been nicely happy with 2x 720p, which is possible on a 5Mbps line I think. I'm still happy when I get a linux ISO in 10min or so. I don't think I'd be crazy joyful if it came in 20 seconds.

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You can stream anything at any bitrate, but 2x 720p on 5 Mbps would be a very extreme case. That would be a third to a quarter the bitrate of a 20-year-old DVD, or 3.5 - 7% the bitrate of a Blu-ray disc. That's less than half the 'Extremely Low' preset of the Sorenson encoder, the lowest you can go without defining custom options.

why do you even need to stream more than a single movie at a time?

I upgraded from 16mbit/s to 50mbit a couple years ago and didn't really notice the difference. Now I could get 400mbit but didn't bother.

Some households contain more than one person.

You'd want to stream more than one movie at a time if you had more than one person in a house.

For example, I used to live in a house where there were 5 of us. I really wanted to subscribe to Netflix, because it was 1/10th the cost of cable TV and suited my needs even better. But the connection just wasn't strong enough for two people to stream video at once so it meant we had to work out a timetable of who could watch movies/TV when, swap blocks if some live event one of us wanted to watch came on, etc, and it just wasn't worth the inconvenience.

Most people live with other people.

As other said, couples, families.

Fair enough, didn't think of that! We're actually 3 here but my wife and I always watch movies together & the baby isn't big on streaming.

I remember the first time my wife and kids made a game unplayable and resulted in a loss for my team. It feels like I perpetually need a faster connection. And it wasn't long after that they forced me into getting a wireless router that supported N because they were saturating the g one we had.

> the baby isn't big on streaming.

I read 'screaming'.

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