We have considered ditching Netflix (content is meh for this household) but after using one of the other apps we frequently bail and find something on NF simply because the overall experience is better.
Apple on the other hand, seems to think: "we have a glorious 4K 60 fps 30 Mbit Dolby Atmos 7.1 extended edition of <movie name> on our server. What's the point in experiencing anything less than the perfect experience? You either get the full shebang, or a spinning loading indicator."
HBO, Disney, Hulu, Apple etc. are all somewhere in the middle, and yes Netflix is FAR ahead of the pack.
The firestick remote replacement app (because I can't ever find the actual remote) is also a joke: it disconnects all the time, fails to reconnect and it is generally not very usable.
I actually think they have some great content, and a pretty decent app. Their “originals” especially are pretty great - Fleabag, the Boys, the Expanse, all excellent. But yeah, the quality of the app is a bit lower than some of the others, and they have a lot less content than Netflix, because Prime is really not a main focus of their company, more of a nice add-on.
Disney streaming is pretty good, but the UI isn't as good as Netflix for use across the room. Why do they make the title cards have second level text that is so small it can't be read, and then not have the continually updated preview that Netflix does?
I agree Amazon is pretty disappointing. It seems more like a dodgy pirate video player than a major competitor.
I assume Netflix ships a much lower level integration that doesn't rely on nearly as many of the TV OS's api's and therefore can launch even when Prime has decided to bork the whole system.
There's a setting for language on the web, but it only affects web.
In my case I'm a foreigner who is still learning the local language, but it must be a real nuisance for people in multilingual countries like Belgium or Switzerland where I guess it would just go "oh, Swiss IP, I guess you want German then".
maybe low for western standards, but the majority of devices worldwide cannot display higher resolutions.
hek, even new budget phones today rarely exceed 720p.
anecdote: worked at a cinema and we cast 720p onto the big canvas (10meters wide) because people would not notice a difference to anything higher. overall bitrate and quality of encoding are mostly the deciding factors.
Netflix limiting mac chrome playback to 720p is case in point if true (though I've never heard this). What % of their "high-end" users is this? My macbook has more than five times as many pixels than 720p... I've never noticed this, and Netflix surely recognizes that they don't stand to gain much by streaming higher resolution to most users.
Netflix, of course, does build for videophiles, but I still hold my conviction to the extent that I constantly question the priority of work to make something 1080p or 4K.
I will certainly concede that VR use cases need higher than 720p resolution.