With season two of “Star Trek: Picard” underway and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” upcoming, it looks like it’s time to activate a Paramount+ subscription. Running at $4.99 a month for the subscription with commercial interruptions, it’s pretty small price to pay for catching up on all that’s been happening in the final frontier.
I haven’t watched any new Star Trek since the shows were on Paramount+’s precursor, CBS All-Access so this week was my first experience with the new service.
Instantly, I noticed that the future wasn’t looking all that great. In particular, it looked like it was running at about 480p, well below the visual quality one would want when watching cutting edge sci-fi.
The cause was obvious enough. By default, most video streaming services will automatically adjust your resolution to whatever it thinks your current connection can handle. This could happen for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the internet superhighway has become a bit congested. It could be that ISPs, unhindered by lack of net neutrality policies, are throttling bandwidth for their own reasons. It could even be that the services themselves are doing it in order to prioritize making sure that their subscribers never see a buffering circle, even if that means substantially reduced image quality as a result.
Whatever the reason, there are often ways around it. Most of the biggest streaming platforms on the web offer options to force your video to play in a specific resolution. YouTube, Twitch, even Crunchyroll have resolution settings built straight into their respective video players. You simply pick out which resolution you want and that’s what you get.
Sadly, that option has not been adopted as an industry standard. Particularly for services that were created in more corporate environments.
Paramount+ has no options for video settings, leaving your image quality completely at their mercy, which, in my limited experience thus far, rarely goes higher than 720p.
$4.99 a month isn’t much, but no matter what you’re paying for HD video, you should get HD video.
Paramount+ is hardly the only offender though. Netflix, the gold standard of streaming, isn’t much better.
Like Paramount, Netflix doesn’t offer you any obvious way to set your preferred resolution. Once upon a time, a semi-secret menu brought up with ctrl-alt-shift-s would allow you to force your Netflix video into a set resolution, however that option seems to have been quietly removed in recent years.
Amazing how a company that is now charging $15.49 a month for “Great video quality in Full HD (1080p)” offers no tools to ensure that their paying customers can actually watch their movies in 1080p.
Not surprisingly, things aren’t much different on Disney+. I can find no way to control the video in the browser, although there are quality settings for the app, which is more than I can say for Netflix.
The most feature anemic streaming service in my catalogue though has to be NBC’s Peacock. Forget quality controls. It took a fair bit of searching to find any settings options at all, and even then they were limited to subtitle settings.
Which is not to say that all streaming services are so stingy.
Amazon Prime, of all things, has rudimentary video quality controls built right into the player. They aren’t particularly descriptive, ranging from “good” to “better” to “best,” but they do at least tell you an estimate of how much bandwidth each setting uses.
Hulu, likewise, offers vague quality control settings from “Best Available” to “Data Saver.” Again, not quite as good as being able to set a specific resolution, but at least you get to express your preference.
Which brings us back to the problem with Paramount+. How is one to watch the latest episodes of “Star Trek: Picard” in the glorious HD they’re paying for when the streaming service won’t deliver their end of the transaction?
Well, there are always other avenues. Not entirely legitimate avenues, but until the legitimate services can match what the seedier side of the internet can offer, its no surprise that people will travel the path of least resistance.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and will see that final frontier even if he has to take a pirate ship to get there.
