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About quality, it's weird it doesn't matter how much bandwidth I seem to have (currently with 1Gbps fiber), the streaming keeps the quality varying down without explanation. If I just pirate the highest quality in less than five minutes I can download the best version of a movie at around 20 GB and watch it in the best quality from start to end without any degradation. Why can't the paid streaming services deliver at the same quality as the pirates?

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They can. You know they can, others (ie: the pirate versions you mention) do. Larger files consume more bandwidth and storage on the CDN, which makes it more expensive. And while there are indeed some issues with lower quality (especially in dark scenes, I'm reminded of the muddy mess in the final episodes of Game of Thrones), most folks are "fine" with the quality we get today. Fine enough, anyway, that they keep paying for the status quo.

That's not to say that they're not interested in providing more quality. There's heavy investment in per-video, and sometimes per-video-section encoding and next generation codecs like AV1. The goal for them though is to get more quality with the same or less storage and bandwidth budget.

Because higher bitrates cost more to store and transmit.if they can drop the size of every file they have by 40% that's 40% savings every time someone streams something even if it looks like dogshit.

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