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Comment by terda12 | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to say, props to NYT for the beautifully designed article.

This is one of the coolest articles I've ever seen. The subtle high-res videos are a really great complement to the content.

And they lagged like nobodies business when they were loading despite having 11Mbps down all to myself.

11Mbps is less than half the FCC's definition of broadband: 25Mbps down.

IIRC Netflix's absolute highest bitrate is 15.6 Mbps (for 4k). This is ~5 seconds of much less than 4k.

> 15.6 Mbps (for 4k)

That must be laughable quality. 1080p blurays easily clock in at more than 22Mbit/s for grainy content, the spec allows 40Mbit/s. And that's not even including the audio. UHD discs must deliver at least 82Mbit/s.

And a lot of content is not even using the things that UHD standards allow to deliver (4:4:4 chroma instead of 4:2:0, higher framerates). So even if they're delivering in HEVC is suspect that the compression is not source-transparent.

Netflix has pretty good compression but yeah this is why I canceled my 4k subscription when they announced they were raising prices. I think 4k is currently $4/mo more and I have a gigabit connection. If they are going to charge 30% more for the privilege they shouldn't compress it to the point where it's not appreciably different from upscaling 1080p.

Streaming services really frustrate me for that reason. I get that bandwidth costs money but when e.g. Play Movies advertises a movie rental for $5 but when that actually means $5 for SD (who the hell even uses SD) but $10 for UHD when it's compressed to shit, what service are you actually providing me?

I had that speed in 2005 and it was slow then, too.

Except, as I indicate in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15515968, the images are extraordinarily low-res with JavaScript turned off.

'Well, turn it on!' is certainly one solution, but of course enabling JavaScript doesn't just let me view images (something HTTP & HTML do just fine anyway), but also enables execution of potential malware, tracking & other nastiness.

There are upsides and downsides to enabling Javascript. If you want to enjoy the NYT rich web content, you need to have it on. Just the way it is.

I hope that JPEGs don't count as 'rich web content'!

Not the person you were replying to, but if they want to sabotage my experience because I don't wish to be tracked or infected with malware, then that's their business I guess. I hope they don't expect me to think delightful thoughts about them for doing it.

Should they make two separate web pages, or rely only on less ornate tooling for a niche user base?

They could just load the images and videos without the need for javascript. We know that they can do this, because they specifically made it show low-res versions for those without javascript. They went out of their way to handle this admittedly niche user base already, purposefully to make their experience worse.

Most people who don't have Javascript are using very old, antiquated browsers. The NYT cares enough about its lower-income and foreign readers to make it fail gracefully. I think that sending low-res photos makes infinitely more sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com