Poor picture quality when streaming Now TV

[Anonymous]

I've recently joined O2 and I'm having trouble when streaming Now TV - the picture quality is incredibly poor and yet I am receiving 30mbps on 4G. However, I can stream on youtube in full 1080p with no problem at all. I cannot work out why the picture quality is so poor. Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Matthew.

[MI5]

Must be a setting within the NowTV options I'd guess.

[Anonymous]

I was involved with the beta testing of Now TV and the one comment I made consistently was the poor quality! To be honest I haven't used it since based on my experience of it in beta!

[perksie · Accepted solution]

You're not alone, maybe asking here might help: http://community.nowtv.com/t5/LG/Extremely-poor-picture-quality/td-p/270776

[viridis]

It's because now Tv only supports 720p streaming.

It looks cack on anything over 5" 1080p screen because that's when we start to see pixelation.

Sky have not said if they ever plan to stream in 1080p as now Tv also incorporates live sky hd channels which are, as a default, 720p.

[viridis]

From digitalspy:

Why has NOW TV elected to set its highest streaming quality at 720p rather than 1080p? 

Our research tells us that the most important factor is providing a smooth viewing experience for our customers, which is why we use adaptive bit-rate technology to minimise buffering.

There are factors that influence video quality other than the resolution, namely encoding profiles, network bandwidth and the quality of the video source itself. If these are not optimised, the video quality will not be great, regardless of the resolution.

At NOW TV we are continually monitoring and improving these aspects to ensure that we achieve the highest quality streams we can.

As compression technology evolves, we will keep looking at how to enhance the viewing experience further. But for now, we believe that NOW TV offers a high-quality streaming experience.

Bottom line is, the encoder is crap for mobile viewing, because on ps4 / pc, I have no problem.