love film teaming up with sony and samsung

[DrizztDan]

Have just learned that Lovefilms have teamed up with Sony and Samsung to stream films direct to their enabled tv's and blu ray players, am thinking of signing up because at about £10 a month its a lot cheaper than Sky as I really only watch films. I've already ordered a Sony BDP S370 My question is are blu ray titles streamed in high definition either 720 or 180 and is the sound also of blu ray quality. I know the obvious answer is to call Lovefilms which I did, they didn't know so told me to call their technical department who had to go away and ask. The answer was they do stream in hi def but I'm not convinced. Anyone use this service who can give me more info. Thanks

Would it match blu ray experience no.

but I wont have to rely on royal mail now.

This is a massive change.

 

[John Duncan]

No the streamed stuff is SD but having seen the 370 upscale on a big FO Samsung telly, I think the convenience is a reasonable tradeoff. You just have to wait for the BluRays through the post...

 

[markyd]

From a technical point of view, the data rate of lovefilm on-demand is about 800kb/s, about the same as iplayer.

iplayer in hd - or 'hq' (720) is 3.2Mb/s.

A blu-ray is about 20-25Mb/s - depending on the length, content + extras.

Personally - I'd wait for the blu-ray, but you can't deny the convienience of the on-demand service. Hopefully LF will roll out an HD/HQ service, though I would be surprised if was not 'premium'

 

[matthewpiano]

Erm.... Actually, if you look at the LoveFilm streaming service on a Bravia, there are some films available in HD although this is 720p I think, rather than 1080p.

 

[Anonymous]

The last ime I was on there (about 1 week ago) I could only find SD films and they where in pcm not dolby digital.

And there was a limited number of films to view, no new releases, but I am sure this will improve in time.

 

[DrizztDan]

sorry my mistake. Fake news item.

 

[matthewpiano]

Actually, to correct what I said, there are HD trailers on the service - I've not bothered to sign up for the full service so I'm not sure about the films. Sorry to mislead.

 

[chris hollands]

If the quality is comparable to the iplayer then that will be pretty poor i think!!

 

[Anonymous]

Being a Lovefilm subscriber I signed up as soon as my new TV arrived (Sony 40HX803).

Quality is 'adequate', definitely SD at best. However it runs a Lovefilm trailer before starting the film, and I think I read somewhere that it was a test of bandwidth. I get a solid 6Mb network connection and there remains noticeable pixelation. My biggest issue with the service is the lack of anything near to current content. A lot of it is movies you've never heard of (or would want to watch), or old TV series (Sharpe for instance). The most commercial films I could find is the Matrix trilogy. As above, crossed fingers that it really takes off.