Hello, I’m Fern, and I’ve been at LOVEFiLM for… well, longer than I care to mention or admit, actually. I’ve seen a lot of changes in that time as we’ve grown the company and expanded the service from humble beginnings.
Choice has always been a key principle for us. Early on, that simply meant making as many films available as we possibly could. These days, it’s also about providing different formats – games, for example, and Blu-ray, and streaming on LOVEFiLM Instant.
Your options continue within the LOVEFiLM Instant service, of course, with an array of different consoles and apps.
And if you’re using a PlayStation®3 to watch films instantly, you have yet another choice – the option of High Quality or Standard Quality streaming.
This option appears each time you select a title to watch. Simply hit the High Quality or Standard Quality button, and your film or TV episode will then play appropriately.
- High Quality – choose this option if your broadband connection is strong and fast (with a speed of 3Mbps or more), as it improves the picture and the sound to near HD levels
- Standard Quality – choose this option if your broadband connection is slower than 3Mbps, to reduce buffering and smooth out playback
If your broadband speed tends to vary depending on the time and day you’re watching, you can choose whichever option suits you best at the time.
Even during playback, just hit the ‘O’ (circle) button, choose the title from the menu screen again, and the HQ/SQ selection page will appear, which could be useful if you’re using High Quality and you start to experience buffering and need to swap to Standard Quality.
I hope you find this helps with your viewing…
Fern O’Sullivan,Group Operations Director
While the quality is a little better, it’s still some way off what I’d call HD and a lot closer to DVD quality from my own experience. As fibre broadband is becoming more and more prolific, I think rate adaptive streams capable of up to 1080p with 5.1 sound are what Lovefilm customers want, I know I certainly do! Other content providers in the UK already provide high quality 1080p content and I really don’t want to get left behind.
Hi Ben, don’t worry, we are working on further improvements to our adaptive bitrate quality, this is only first phase, regards Fern
@Ben Robinson In principle I agree with you, but you have to consider the price. It isn’t possible for lovefilm, nor really any provider to provide a service at that price at the level of quality that you stated.
I also believe that the industry will not ever willingly adopt something like that for masses, as it will mean a significant decline in the amount of purchased / available physical media.
Also on a technical note, 120mb broadband is the level at which it would be technically possible to stream uncompressed blu ray cinema straight to your box. Which would require complete saturation of the connection. Alas I digress…
Why do you claim that choice is important to you, when you are reducing it?
Do you think that your consumers are so stupid as to think that by reducing the categories it is for any other reason than so you can claim that you are “increasing satisfaction”.
Quite frankly I would be more impressed if you renamed the categories
1: Films I want to see.
2: Films that I want to see, but really don’t care if I don’t.
3: Films that I am not really that bothered about, but which can be used as an excuse to get out of visiting the inlaws.
How about high quality on the web/flash player, for those that don’t want to spend £300 to purchase a PS3?
Hi, our website does already offer adaptive bitrate streaming; this is an automatic selection dependant on the bandwidth available at time of play rather than selecting it yourself as on the PS3. All this is first phase of quality improvements with more to come, regards Fern
I don’t understand why this is only available to PS3 users! Those of us watching on computers are no longer sitting in front of 15 inch CRT monitors and the quality just isn’t good enough to watch on a larger screen. Netflix offer some stuff in HD, YouTube dont have any problem in allowing users to switch to 1080p where available – though I’d be happy with standard DVD quality.
Please do this on the Xbox 360 as well!!?? B-)
Currently, apart from Xbox’s own Zune, the only Video App on Marketplace that puts your viewings in HD, is Netflix, which I have to say is a great service, but obviously a very different one to Lovefilm, hence the reason I subscribe to both.
The cool thing that Netflix does is that it doesn’t give you the option for HD or SD – It will broadcast in HD if your bandwith is good enough, otherwise it will just broadcast in SD.
Similar to what someone has already said, but was for PS3, if Netflix do it, then Lovefilm should definitely do it.
Good luck with it all.
Hi,
Glad to see things are improving. Can’t believe people don’t understand that the website uses silverlight which automatically streams as per the connections speed. I’d be happy to see this update pushed to Sony’s bluray players.
Please could you expand on your road map for these sorts of updates?!
Edward
While the quality is better the underlining problem of a limit of 20 pages is still there. Will this ever be fixed? This is a big problem and has been from the start. A 20 page limit on the A to Z listing makes for a very poor user experience. There are ways around this problem but only if you know what film you’re looking. As a whole LoveFilms PS3 app is ok but not GOOD.
I really love the changes or shall I say the improvements and its quality that Lovefilm has as of now compared to the past.And wish to have more updates and more features in it.And I understand that in the field of business there are competitor’s to compete with just like Netflix and Lovefilm.Both have different features but for me both are really useful for there are features we can found on Lovefilm and not on netflix and vice versa. So I guess the decision is in our hands and choose which is the best fit for our needs as far as movies/films is concern.