Google Stadia's Claims For Streaming In 4K Seem... No, Just No

from the like,-really-no dept

Google's Stadia product, the company's bid to get gamers to give up their consoles and PC rigs and instead partake in Gaming as a Service, has had a rocky rollout to say the least. The service was already up against America's pathetic broadband coverage and usage caps. Add to that the quite muted applause that came from press and public reviews, not to mention the Obamacare-like rollout of the product, and you have to wonder if this is the kind of hit to a product's reputation that is at all recoverable. It's nearly as though Google developed a list of things that are important to gamers specifically and went out of its way to ensure it would get failing grades on each item.

The latest issue is no different. To combat concerns about how streaming games would behave in terms of quality, Google made claims that the service would stream games in 4k resolution and at 60 frames per second. Reality, it would seem, doesn't line up with those claims.

Google’s Phil Harrison explicitly said that all games will be running at 4K 60fps, but Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 simply don’t. Rather, they’re upscaled to meet that. Worse yet, there was a tweet that seemingly confirmed Red Dead Redemption 2 would run at 4K, but that tweet was swiftly deleted. Presumably Google was quick to prevent what would have been a blatant lie from being on its account knowing that the game was at a lower resolution.

Since the first reveal of Stadia, Google has bragged about the powerful hardware running the service and how it can handle 4K at 60fps without breaking a sweat, even leveraging multiple instances to better improve the quality. So far, though, we’ve yet to see Stadia actually pulling that off. If the company had said that some games ran at lower resolutions and relied on upscaling or even pushed the underlying hardware prowess less, this would be less of a problem. The same would apply if the settings these games run at on Google’s end were disclosed more obviously.

After the 9to5google.com post was initially published, Google reached out to them to clarify the whole situation. That clarification amounted to Google again stating that Stadia can run games at 4k and high frame rates, but that Google also gives publishers flexibility on how to deliver the streamed game to allow for the best experience, similar to how other streaming game services do.

There are a couple of problems with Google's pushback. First, it was Google that made the blanket claim about the resolution and frame rate Stadia would run at. To now clarify that by stating that developers can stream their games in other resolutions, or upscale them to 4k, deviates from that selling point. Disappearing tweets with similar claims only adds to the impression that all of this amounts to false claims to generate sales.

Second, whatever the specifics in Google's clarification, games that were promised in 4k instead look like muddled heaps of trash.

There is a great deal more in terms of images on Twitter comparing on-prem and streaming graphics. This, again, is another one of those things you cannot get away with when it comes to serving the gaming public. It's not as though it were some kind of secret that gamers really, really care about graphics and production values. A pitch to ditch a console or PC for versions of games that run more slowly and at lower graphical quality is a complete non-starter.

Much of the press for Stadia seems to conclude that game-streaming of this kind is a great idea that will eventually be awesome, but that Google is probably a handful of years too early with all of this. The real question, it seems, is whether Google has torpedo'd its reputation in this market to the point that it won't be able to sell this product even when it is ready.

Filed Under: 4k, stadia, streaming, truth in advertising, video games
Companies: google

'House Of Cards' In 4K Will Eat Broadband Caps Like Popcorn Shrimp

from the pricing-innovation dept

After years of pretending that broadband usage caps were necessary because of network congestion, the cable industry not all that long ago admitted that congestion had nothing to do with it. While the industry still pretends that usage caps on broadband networks are about their expression of "creativity" and "pricing innovation," most people realize caps were always designed to milk yet more money out of an already profitable network (and make no mistake, unlimited, flat-rate pricing is profitable), while allowing gatekeepers to simultaneously cash in on and inhibit Internet video. Carriers are relentlessly trying to expand usage caps under the banner of "fairness," and they're aided by an uncompetitive broadband market.

Despite claims that imposing caps is about altruism or even helping grandmothers, most consumers understand that ISPs want them to pay more money for the same product at a time when network hardware and bandwidth costs are falling. Generally, ISPs that do impose caps insist that these caps will be flexible as modern usage evolves. That claim is about to get tested more seriously as next-generation game console downloads and 4K video slowly come to market.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings not that long ago stated the company's planned 4K streams will need at least 15 Mbps but optimally 50 Mbps. Streaming a 1080p 3D movie from Netflix at the moment eats around 4 to 5 GB per hour, a total that could jump to closer to 20 to 30 GB per hour with 4K video. Similarly, Sony is cooking up a 4K video download service that could involve downloads as high as 100 GB per title. It's a subject getting revisited with everybody binge-watching "House of Cards." Tacking 4K video on to existing bandwidth consumption begins to get very bandwidth intensive when you're talking about entire series at 4K resolution (how much modern compression codecs like Google's VP9 or H.265 will help are very rough estimates):

"Streaming in 1080p on Netflix takes up 4.7GB/hour. So a regular one-hour episode of something debiting less than 5GB from your allotment is no big deal. However, with 4K, you've got quadruple the pixel count, so you're burning through 18.8GB/hour. Even if you're streaming with the new h.265 codec—which cuts the bit rate by about half, but still hasn't found its way into many consumer products—you're still looking at 7GB/hour. But you're not watching just one episode, are you? Of course not! You're binging on House of Cards, watching the whole series if not in one weekend then certainly in one month. That's 639 minutes of top-quality TV, which in 4K tallies up to 75GB if you're using the latest and greatest codec, and nearly 200GB if not. That means, best case scenario, a quarter of your cap—a third, if you're a U-Verse customer with a 250GB cap—spent on one television show. Throw in a normal month's internet usage, and you're toast."

Gizmodo doesn't note that many people's bandwidth caps are even lower. CenturyLink, Suddenlink and AT&T lay claim to tens of millions of DSL users (which the companies don't intend to upgrade anytime soon) who face 150 GB monthly caps on top of a significant flat monthly fee -- plus sometimes the cost of a mandatory copper voice line and all the additional, annoying fees that entails. Those slower, 3-10 Mbps connections in reality cost very little to provision and provide, but there's the rub: these customers are being aggressively beaten about the head and neck on price because of limited nationwide competition. Innovation and creative pricing, indeed.

ISPs have long defended low bandwidth caps by claiming that the majority of today's users wouldn't be impacted by them, knowing full well that the majority of tomorrow's users would. That day is coming quicker than you'd think, and it's worth watching whether ISPs are flexible on allotments, or if they keep existing allotments firmly in place to intentionally clothesline Internet video customers -- especially those looking to cut the cord.

Filed Under: 4k, broadband, house of cards, reed hastings
Companies: netflix

The Lesson Of 3D TV: For 4K TV, The Key Is The Implementation

from the style-and-substance dept

To describe the adoption and sales of 3D TVs as underwhelming would be an understatement. Sales may not be absolutely abysmal, depending on your definition, but this was supposed to be the next thing, and it turns out most consumers don't give two poops about 3D television. (We really love that TechDigest.tv paid us homage with their logo, btw). Despite awful gimmicks, 3D TVs have always felt like a product that was created for a market that manufacturers intended to produce, rather than encourage, through marketing.

Well, if you've been paying attention to the news coming out of CES, one of the new buzz words you may recognize is "4K TV", which offers picture resolutions up to 4 times what was previously available on big screen TVs. But, just as there was with 3D TVs, questions abound about whether or not a large enough market exists for these products.

The word 3D is barely being uttered at CES 2013, but just about all the major TV makers are talking about 4K or ultra-definition HDTV that has four times the resolution of those 1080p sets many of us now own. That's a lot of pixels, which means the picture will be sharper not just when you're sitting several feet away from the set but even if you get up close.

But most us don't get all that close to big screen TVs. The 4K sets being shown at CES are big. Samsung has an 85 inch set, Sony is already selling an 84 inch model. About the smallest set you'll find is 55 inches but even with that size screen, people tend to sit a bit from the screen. I have a 55 inch 1080p set perched several feet in front of my living room couch so I rarely get close enough to my TV to notice any gaps between pixels.

The idea here is that at some point, there are going to be diminishing returns on resolution. Whether 1080p represents that point remains to be seen, but it may be reasonable to think that we've reached a level where more needs to be done to generate interest in higher resolution TVs besides just announcing them and showing the normal demos. They tried that with 3D TVs, along with a few movies that lended themselves well to the 3D experience, and we know that wasn't enough. The real opportunity here is content, specifically good 4K TV content that really takes advantage of all that the technology has to offer. That means content shot with the higher resolutions in mind, including mind-blowing shots that will simply pop with the higher resolution. Sony is the big player here, so you can probably already guess the route they've decided to go.

Taking advantage of the fact that it owns its own movie studios, Sony is trying to jump start content by re-rendering some of its own films into 4K and encouraging short film makers to create content. But it will still be awhile before there is enough native 4K content out there to give viewers a lot of choice of programming.

Sorry, but rehashing old content isn't going to do the trick here, and a lack of early adoption and interest may doom 4K TV to 3D TV's fate. It's all about the implementation. Your new release should show us why we already want the product, not try to generate interest that wasn't natively there. Higher resolutions could be a selling point, were there content that took advantage of it. Given that Sony, as already mentioned, owns its own movie studios, I would have expected them to have timed the product release to something they'd created to take advantage of it. Sadly, it looks like the $20k+ 4K TV devices won't be off to a hot, or useful, start.

Filed Under: 4k, execution, hype, tvs