Earlier this week, Walmart announced that they have jumped onto the Ultraviolet wagon, allowing customers to first purchase their DVDs or Blu-Rays, then pay an additional $2-5 fee to provide Digital Rights access.  For those who are not familiar with Digital Rights Management, it is basically a form of access control, allowing or preventing media from being played.  In many cases, DRM is applied on the file, but Ultraviolet is one of the latest DRM creations to surface because its cloud-based, which means it must be able to connect to the Internet to work.   iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix already offer protected online access to movies, and they do it a hell of a lot better.

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I love Amazon and use them for the purchase of nearly all of my consumer products.  When it comes to streaming video though, I rarely look to them.  Netflix is my true love for streaming movies, hands down.  My Apple use mainly consists of movie trailers, but thats about it – explanation to follow.  When I sat down for 10 minutes and scribbled down the hours of viewing per month, the break down came to something like this:

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Yesterday, Netflix blogged that they have modified their service to allow Canadian users to reduce streaming quality, to avoid exceeding customers’ monthly bandwidth allowance forced by Canadian internet providers.  The service will default to “Good” quality and allow users to turn up the bandwidth usage to “Better” or “Best”, which should result in better quality video.  Below are the settings as I understand them:

1. “Good” – The default setting of 625 Kbps with good picture quality and lowest data use per hour (about 0.3 GBytes/hour)
2. “Better” – Better picture quality of 1300 Kbps and medium data use per hour (about 0.7 GBytes/hour)
3. “Best” – Best picture quality of 4800 Kbps and highest date use per hour (generally about 1.0 GBytes/hour – or up to 2.3 GBytes/hour when streaming HD content)

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