Weekend Question: Quality vs. Convenience?
Go-go gadget guy Dave Zatz has a post up asking, “Where’s the HD Amazon VOD?” He points to various hints (his “mole” at TiVo talking about an Amazon HD service, and a post on Amazon’s End User blog) that indicate HD streams are on the way from the retailer — but until then, your VOD is strictly SD. Our question to you is: Given the ability to choose from mor than 40,000 titles from your couch (or the 12,000 on Netflix), does the convenience of the video trump the quality?
Let’s just get this caveat out of the way. OBVIOUSLY everything is better in HD, and at some point Amazon will offer the high-def streaming. And let’s add another caveat that, at least in my tests so far, Amazon’s picture quality is not hideous and not as spotty as Netflix’s streaming.
I used to be an HD snob, but after playing with the Amazon VOD on Roku, a little fuzziness around the edges just didn’t bother me, and I became a don’t-have-to-leave-the-house snob (though for rentals only — I wouldn’t purchase SD content).
So we turn the question over to the NewTeeVee audience. How much video quality are you willing to sacrifice in the name of convenience?
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IF I didn’t have other high-def options, I’d make do with SD. But Amazon is competing with cable VOD, Xbox 360, PS3, Vudu, AppleTV who all offer HD titles… My main problem has been that many TiVo-encoded Amazon SD titles don’t look very good – both letterboxed and pillarboxed with stutters with camera pans.
The goood news is that multiple sources are now confirming for me Amazon VOD in HD is currently in testing on TiVo.
It seems like convenience is winning. But in my opinion it’s so only because convenience must be at the first place and second most important thing should be quality.
I am totally with you. I think HD has its place but when it comes to at-fingertips content, what’s WAY more important than absolute image quality is sound quality and smoothness of delivery.
Our eyes “fill in” for what’s missing visually (we interpolate just like an image editor or a data modeler) but our ears are very picky. And we do NOT have time for buffering issues. Puhlease!