To be perfectly honest we could probably just leave this story as the headline accompanied by the following Gif…

…but in the interest of professionalism ( ¯_(”/)_/¯ ) we’ll continue.

By now you’re all well aware, and probably super amped up, on the impending expansion into Australia of US-based online streaming giant Netflix. Or, at the very least, those of you without VPN‘s and the ability to Google a random fake US street address are super amped on it (you’re looking at a proud “resident” of Hoboken, NJ right here).

One of Netflix’s great selling points is its ability to deliver video of an extremely high quality with little-to-no waiting or buffering time. But the great hurdle for that in Australia remains our (by current Western standards) primitive broadband speeds. And these are speeds which are further being hampered by a truncated NBN scheme – weakened by Coalition Government rollback – that now will only deliver Fibre to the Node technology that relies on outdated pre-existing infrastructure, rather than the originally planned, cutting edge Fibre to the Premises model.

But Netflix executives, ahead of an expansion into a major new market, were keen to prove that this bandwidth limitation wouldn’t hinder the platform’s performance. In a media briefing in the heart of Sydney, the company was prepped to show off a stream of an episode of House of Cards in 4K – the ultra high-def quality that represents the peak of Netflix’s capabilities.

‘Course, we live in a land where nice things cannot be had. So when the demo was attempted – even despite being in the middle of Sydney, and despite being the only “legitimate” Netflix user in the country at time – the internet speeds crapped out on them, and a stable 4K stream was not possible.

Instead, the company showed off its “adaptive streaming” feature, which saw the episode of Cards buffered down to just above normal HD instead. Company spin doctor Cliff Edwards explained thusly:

“We have software called adaptive streaming and it will essentially notice that the network is getting congested and it will automatically step down the resolution from 4k to better than HD and if more people are on the network it will step down to HD and then if its still congested it will step down to SD.“

They also assured media that the connection was a test device aimed at servers in the UK, and would not reflect the end-user experience for customers in Australia.

Still, y’know, if existing network congestion can’t even get the good stuff working for one person, it’s hard to imagine that hundreds or thousands of customers won’t feel the same effects when they all try and get on board at the same time.

We’ve got till March to wait until we find out for sure. I guess, till then, just cross your fingers and hope the NBN has been rolled out to your neighbourhood.

Photo: Pascal Le Segretain via Getty Images.

via Mumbrella.