This is a fact that seems to be embraced and accepted by all, despite the fact that most arguments claim to give priority to quality. Starting from the fact that one creates a Facebook page (for example) aimed at clarity and accuracy, but everyone prefers one lacking any information and filled with typos and inaccuracies, convenience is always preferred.

Not too long ago, Netflix announced the throttling of the quality of its streaming services. This comes as a necessity in a world where the total broadband speed is continually decreasing due to physical infrastructure limitations, topology issues. In fact, not many services dare to offer streaming at true HD quality (considering that Blu-Rays require tens of gigabytes to store the info and even compressed video often require up to 16Gb, depending on codec choice, compression method in both video and audio, chosen output quality, etc – that may be a good thing). This makes sense when thinking that the average broadband access speed in Europe aims only a little over 10 Mb/s and this is thanks to Eastern European countries like Poland and Romania where practical consumer broadband speeds top up around 50Mb/s (though often advertised even towards 100 Mb/s). This translates to average European download speeds of at most 500kb/s.

Even if somehow the entire broadband of your computer could be dedicated to one streaming video, a HD episode of Game of Thrones (1.5 Gb HD compressed) would have a hard time making an uninterrupted experience. Throttling the quality makes perfect sense for those actually providing HD content (hard to say since everyone advertise HD content but when push comes to download, that is rarely the case) but in that case in many situations you may not get the HD content you wanted (and/or paid for, exception for the copyright-challenged pirate sites).

Since that is the case anyway and not many people actually complain, what can we say? Not many people actually care about real quality. In fact, we have a hard time defining quality because sometimes not even real HD quality is actually HD quality. In truth, we can only conclude that there is a gap of “acceptable quality” which individual users are willing to trade for.