Hi,

Do any of the on-line film services such as Netflix and Lovefilm offer Blu-Ray films that can be streamed?

Anyone use these and is the quality as good as having the disc?

Thanks

Netflix offers what they call super HD which looks very good, don't know if what they stream is technically the same spec as Bluray, ie bitrate/resolution etc.

Much of their content is accompanied by 5.1 audio too, no HD audio, possibility this could come later.

Try it out, you get a months free trial.

I don't use it but it's 5 to 7 Mbps so that means the answer is no. The quality at best is probably similar to or less than BBC1 HD or ITV1 HD, and a bit better than Youtube 1080p.

https://support.netflix.com/en/node/8731

At a guess it's similar to Iplayer in HD. ie 720p25 1280 x 720 25fps. Anything higher would not be viable. Blu-ray 1080p24 runs at around 35Mbps. Not many of us are lucky enough to have broadband connections fast enough to maintain this sort of speed nor truly unlimited download limits.

A dual layer BD disc stores around 50GB of data.

Thanks for the replies. I'm getting Fibre broadband installed hence the question. No download / upload limit unlike my current broadband service.

What speed ?. Are you sure there's no limit ?. Most impose reasonable use limits and can throttle your speed at peak periods.

Speed is estimated to be 65MB and is unlimited.

Plusnet Unlimited Fibre Broadband:

http://www.plus.net/home-broadband/broadband-only/

It's 1080p at 5 to 7Mbps. Says so here: https://signup.netflix.com/superhd

I imagine it will only be 1080p25 (like some Freeview-HD content).

720p50 may well give better results.

Would that really matter for film content?

Put it like this at that sort of bitrate it's not going to look as good as Blu-ray.

Well, that wasn't the question I asked, but thanks anyway.

And no, streamed Netflix doesn't look as good as Blu-ray, but considering how it is delivered, i have to say their "1080p SuperHD" content is surprisingly impressive.