The rumors had been abounding since March, but now it’s finally come to pass. Netflix has data controls for its streaming apps, so you don’t suck your data plan dry in all the places that bore you to tears, yet lack WiFi. And they’re smart, intuitive controls, to boot.
The update, which is going live across all platforms as we speak, is designed around data, not more or less meaningless resolution numbers. Netflix crunched some numbers and figured out the optimal data rates that compromise between video quality and data usage, and has them as an easy-to-grasp buffet of settings designed around how many hours you can stream on 1GB of data. The default setting will get you three hours on a gig, but low will land you four hours on a gig. Unlimited data plan types can select higher quality streams that offer two and even one hour per gig spent.
The main question is, how do these settings look? Some test viewing on Android and iOS tells us that, anecdotally, it looks pretty good, and the default setting is surprising in that respect. There’s an obvious quality difference between “low” and “high”, but “low” looks fairly acceptable, and the quality is mostly stuff like color banding that’s easy to gloss over when you just want to kill some time. One thing that definitely helped was to use a smaller screen, and if your phone has a low screen resolution in the first place, you likely won’t even notice the difference. As for audio, we used the standard mobile listening setup for audio, namely cheap earbuds, and didn’t hear any problems, and it also comes in over the speaker clearly.
In short, if you’re stuck somewhere for a while and want to catch up on a show, Netflix just made it a lot cheaper to do so. Just don’t be the guy who uses the speaker in public; that’s what closed captions are for.
(via Engadget)