Game Of Thrones has always been a cutting edge show. Initially due to the scale of its story and its tendency for summarily doing away with lead characters, and then in later series in terms of its monumental production values.
With episode three of Season 8, though, The Long Night, that cutting edge spirit seems to have got the show into a spot of trouble.
No sooner had the episode aired than social media exploded with people complaining about its picture quality. Either the image was so dark viewers often couldn’t see what was happening, or it was plagued by severe and distracting amounts of blocking and banding noise.
So widespread were the issues and so varied the contributing causes to them that the episode seems to me to represent a key moment in the the evolution of both TV hardware and TV content creation.
This shot of Daenerys and Jorah was one of the few literal bright points in The Long Night. But even here many people experienced blocking and banding in the swirling smoke.
Photo: HBOI’ve looked in previous articles at three of the factors contributing to why The Long Night upset so many viewers: the lack of any 4K HDR availability, the limitations of today’s TVs, and the potential problems for living room viewers caused by the episode’s cinematic production values.
In this final article in the series, I’m turning my attention to what’s probably the single biggest contributor to the episode’s picture quality woes: the heavy handed video compression systems used to distribute the show into all of our living rooms.
For streaming platforms and, especially, broadcasters, delivering video is an exercise in ‘the squeeze’: fitting digital video streams through delivery pipes that aren’t really wide enough to handle them.
Achieving this invariably involves using digital compression processing to look for ways to reduce the amount of video information being sent at any given moment. The extent of the blocking and banding side effects this caused by this compression can vary from platform to platform, and be affected at the reception end by variables such as broadband speed. At its worst, though, compression noise can look really pretty horrible. And for many people watching The Long Night, it was at its worst. Especially, it seems on some high-brightness LCD TVs.
So bad were the issues via some delivery platforms, in fact, that they ruthlessly exposed just how hard it is for high-end ‘linear’ scheduled TV to keep up in performance terms with on-demand services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. And in doing so they ironically proved to be a massive advert for another AV technology that we keep hearing is on its death bed: physical media.
Look carefully and you might just spot the Night King in the darkness.
Photo: Game Of Thrones, HBOTo explain this better, let’s start by diving deeper into why The Long Night suffered so particularly badly with compression noise - starting with the nature of its content.
The thing is, the really dark, highly detailed images you get almost throughout The Long Night are exactly the sort of images that are most likely to give compression systems a headache and lead to the ugliest blocking and banding noise. Finely shaded moving content such as mist or smoke is also known to cause compression issues - and The Long Night had plenty of that too.
The show’s immense popularity also potentially contributed to The Long Night’s excessive noise. After all, the pressure on the infrastructure and contention rates of every streaming platform - and every Internet Service Provider (ISP) - must be extreme when any Game Of Thrones episode is on. So there’s every chance that, for instance, streaming speeds were throttled to cope with the sudden run on data the show caused. And reducing the available broadband bit rate to cope with the heavy data demand would result in more compression with streamed versions of the show than you might expect to see with less popular shows.
It’s useful at this point to try and put some numbers on some of the delivery systems that carried the now infamous The Long Night GoT episode. Website ibc.org, which caters for the global media, entertainment and technology community, carried an article reporting that HBO Now and HBO Go stream with data rates of around 5Mbps, while Amazon Channels, which carries the show in the US, generally operates at rates closer to 10Mbps.
The same article also tracked rates of Sky UK’s live satellite broadcast of the show at around 7Mbps, while Sky users in the UK noted that if you downloaded the episode from Sky’s catch-up service, you actually got a much larger and therefore noticeably cleaner looking video file than you got if you recorded the live stream.
Game Of Thrones picture quality is transformed on Blu-ray. Hell, even the packaging is gorgeous.
Photo: Game Of Thrones Blu-ray boxset, HBOThe Now TV streaming platform in the UK, meanwhile, bizarrely currently only delivers its content (including Game Of Thrones) at 720p resolutions. As just reported by PocketLint, Now TV is going to be upping the resolution of its streams from its current 720p level to full 1080p HD later in the year. But not in time to include the last episodes of Season 8.
These sorts of difference in data rate, delivery approach and even resolution between various platforms explain why some viewers enjoyed better picture quality with The Long Night than others. But they also provide a pretty stark reminder of why anyone who really values AV quality should always spare a thought for buying stuff on disc.
After all, while broadcast and streaming services struggle to top 10Mbps, Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray discs can hit 40Mbps and 100Mbps respectively. As you would expect, this means the picture quality you get from the Game Of Thrones disc releases to date is far superior to anything I’ve ever witnessed on a streaming or broadcast platform.
The Blu-ray picture available for seasons one through seven looks beautifully clean compared with any of the live streaming or broadcast pictures, with scarcely a hint of compression-related blocking or banding noise. Detail levels and general sharpness are much higher, and intriguingly even the contrast and shadow detailing is far superior.
The difference between live broadcast/streams of Game Of Thrones and physical media goes to a whole new level when you’re talking about 4K Blu-ray. So far only the first season of the show has appeared in this format, but it looks absolutely stunning - like seeing the show again for the first time. It's even more rich in detail and sharpness than the HD Blu-ray, with no hint of compression, but also benefits from a huge improvement in contrast thanks to some brilliantly applied high dynamic range and wide color work.
High dynamic range, if you’re not familiar with it, delivers images using a much larger range of light than SDR - ideal for the sort of cinematic, contrast-heavy imagery Game Of Thrones thrives on.
In fact, once you’ve seen Game Of Thrones looking gorgeous in 4K HDR (you can read my review of the 4K Blu-ray here), it’s hard not to think that this - especially with the latter seasons of the show - is the way the show’s creators really want it to be seen. Maybe even the way they’re seeing it themselves if they’re working in the first instance to create a 4K HDR master (check out my previous article for more on this).
I wouldn't be at all surprised if The Long Night is transformed into one of the show's best-looking episodes once it finds its way onto 4K Blu-ray.
Season One of Game Of Thrones is currently the only one available on 4K Blu-ray. But it looks sensational.
Photo: Game Of Thrones 4K Blu-ray artwork, HBOIt’s not just having all the extra data bandwidth to play with that gives physical media such a huge leg up over any current streaming or broadcast options for the show. Also key is physical media’s consistency. In other words, every single time you watch a Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray, you get exactly the same high quality of experience. There are no variables such as streaming contention rates, ISP throttling, inconsistent Wi-Fi performance, poor broadband speeds, broadcaster bandwidth allocations…
Opting to watch Game Of Thrones in the pristine quality it deserves by going for a disc release obviously comes with strings attached. First, the disc releases don’t come out until months after the shows have aired - and these days spoilers tend to be all over social media within minutes of a new episode airing.
Second, discs cost money. Game Of Thrones Season One on 4K Blu-ray currently costs £38 in the UK and $25 in the US (and it was much more expensive when it first came out). On HD Blu-ray, the boxset of all eight seasons is currently showing for pre-order in the US at $250.
Plus, of course, you need all the secondary kit required to unlock the picture quality joys of the disc formats: 4K or HD Blu-ray players, and suitably capable TVs.
Nonetheless, while there may be things that HBO and to some extent viewers might be able to do to improve the streaming/broadcast Game Of Thrones experience (as discussed in the previous articles in this series) the fact remains that when it comes to the pure quality of your AV experience terms, physical media is still very much king. Something that anyone excitedly predicting the death of the disc might do well to remember.
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If you found this article interesting, you might also like these:
Game Of Thrones Picture Problems Part 1: A Plea For Pixels
Game Of Thrones Picture Problems Part 2: The Trouble With TVs
Game Of Thrones Picture Problems Part 3: When TV Goes To The Movies
Amazon Video Announces New Films And TV Shows For May (2019)
Sky Announces New 4K Films, TV Shows And Sports Events for May (2019)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2019/05/12/game-of-thrones-picture-problems-part-4-all-hail-the-shiny-disc/
2019-05-12 13:05:00Z
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