HBO should use a different bumper for streaming.
HBO should use a different bumper for streaming.
The bumper...I don't know what it's called...that little clip with the snow that fades in and reveals the logo.
It's terrible.
For one, a lot of people actually don't know what TV static is. Analog broadcasts stopped almost 16 years ago, and before that, most younger people had cable.
For another, static is really difficult to compress. It looks horrible and consumes way too much bandwidth for just a couple of seconds that won't even load right. If anything, they should cache a local copy of the bumper in-app in a format that doesn't look like ass when every pixel changes every frame.
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If they stick with it, it’ll sort itself out over time. They are most of the way there by now. The newest codecs are pretty dang good.
Video codecs mostly work by tracking movement, predicting which pixels will change, and striving to only encode the pixels that actually change or change dramatically. In other words, compression looks for patterns.
All of that goes out the window when you try to compress static. There are no patterns. It simply can't be compressed. This isn't a matter of the algorithms not being good enough. It's a fundamental limit of information theory.
Anything fancier amounts to embedding the intro into the compressor as a well-known pattern. And at that point, you're better off just caching a 4K version of the intro as a standalone video file directly in the app.
Why not just have the app dynamically generate the static with random numbers every time. There is no video file of white noise, and bonus the bumper intro is never exactly the same twice.
That's a good idea. They could probably do something similar for the audio.
They'd have to code around the rest of the animation and audio effects, but the size of that code would certainly be smaller than the rendered audio and video.
These are both really cool ideas and seem like a fun project.
You guys are basically describing the old Demoscene.
Love that stuff, it's so cool.
Do you think dynamically rendering 4k snow is something your typical FireTV stick is capable of doing?
Maybe we've gotten used to that very particular white noise pattern and anything else would feel wrong?
Completely pulled that out of my ass, for the record.