argyle43 Poor internet speed is a fundamental challenge of the whole streaming industry. Especially for heavy bandwidth VR.
I'm really surprised many people find themselves in such a situation. I bet all over Europe you get 100Mbps as least default, while normally it's around 1Gbps now.
Definitely something to think about. On the other hand it's imminent for VR to rely on good connection. DLNA isn't really fixing it, but it's a way around.
doublevr To really enjoy VR you need a good headset
You haven’t heard from everyone on this yet. I know people with the very best headsets, Pimax and others, that avoid online streaming because the quality is far better downloading and streaming on their local network… via DLNA or similar.
doublevr bet all over Europe you get 100Mbps
This is not the case in many rural parts of the United States. I think you’ll find that you have more subscribers that do not enjoy the bandwidth speeds you mention, than actually do. Unlimited 100Mbps+ service is not as common as you might think.
Anyway, I’m now just repeating my points so I’ll let others weigh in. @doublevr, I appreciate that you stay engaged in this forum and respectfully ask that you be open to the many protests you’re going to see when others become aware of this thread and the potential direction you’re considering here.
You could just say flat out that in the future you're planning to be a streaming service only. Let me guess, you cant DL the scenes soon neither, or you'll have to buy them individually in order to do so? I'm sorry, but the tech isnt even close to being there yet, so the only thing you'll be doing is losing customers.
Also your own experience of never using dlna is not the customer research you may think it is. It's good to have visions and so on, but I think all youre doing is pissing of the existing customers with this.
No renewal for me. Support always blames the customers ISP yet I can max out my gigabit connection with many other subs, only SLR struggles to keep up. SLR get a better rep, this doublevr dude is a moron and doing so much brand damage. Just check out reddit.
doublevr For info, the fiber is not deployed on 100% of each European territory, and even in the countries where it is well developed, there is still a huge share of customers still with simple copper adsl subscription.
It's not because the fiber is deployed that everyone has to have a subscription.
Hunky-Dory Also the new UI is a massive step backwards, far to big, and it needs resolution, zoom, tilt on the main controls and popup for all other image options, and maybe an option to change the opacity of the UI to make it slighty see thru - but i won't hold my breath.
The idea is that everything could be programmed with controllers. You don't need a menu for that.
doublevr Personally, I don't have the problem because I have a gigabit connection.
But I fully understand the situation of those who are not.
I will take for example the case of my country, France, 92% of the territory is connected to the fiber, but only 42% of the households are connected.
So on all the internet in France, less than 40% of the customers use the fiber, the rest is still on simple copper adsl.
And France is far from being the only country in Europe in this case.
The comparison with cd's, floppy disks and other very old technology is not really relevant because the users of these media, even if there are still some, must represent less than 1% of people.
On the long term, yes, fiber will be the majority and the copper network will disappear, but it's not tomorrow, on the short/medium term, adsl users will still be very important.
Edit: Even in the US, according to OECD statistics from a few days ago, there is less than 20% of the population using fiber (but still slightly more fiber users than adsl).
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
After reading the responses from @"doublevr" all i have to say is damn, how disappointing, frustrating and frankly expected given the way feedback generally seems to be handled around this app. I cannot believe part of the reasoning or rational is this is ok is "like when apple killed a floppy". Clearly if your engineers can figure out how to stream these experiences, its well within their skill sets to support other local streaming protocols.
Please do not get rid of DNLA, it's the only way I'm able to play scripts and videos. My internet is decent but even still, I have issues with streaming, so I prefer to download them. I love the content y'all put out but if this gets axed I'll need to cancel my sub. Unfortunate too because I was going to pull the trigger on a lifetime sub. You say you pride yourself on listening to your customers, and there's a lot of us beating this drum
damn im speechless - How can u even consider to discontinue DLNA Support. Specially when there is no other player who supports 200 degi vids if im correct.
that would be a very wrong decision but how i see im not the only one thinking that.
Just found out via reddit you and deovr are deleting the DLNA option. Please don't or else I will have to unsubscribe to slr due to living in an area without fiber high-speed service. I cannot control where I live and what Internet providers provide in my service area. Obviously this is the same for others.. I cannot stream videos or interactive scripts via your apps without having constant delays and stoppages. As others here and on reddit have also said this would be a terrible decision to do away with dlna. So just dont.
Hoo boy. Gonna go long on this one because there's a lot to address.
I don't know if this is a cynical business decision, or really about "vision", but either way it's a massive misstep.
Let's assume vision. That's all well and good. But your vision is not even close to universally accessible, as demonstrated by many people here. I have gigabit internet. I still can't reliably stream above 2160 before it starts freezing every 30 seconds or so. I can, however, reliably download a video in minutes, because even if the connection slows down for a few minutes for whatever reason, it's still going to get finished. And of course there's those who have no access to gigabit internet. Here is a broadband map of the US: https://broadbandnow.com/national-broadband-map. If you set it to maximum speed, you will find that a vast majority of the country is limited to much less, with only the major metropolitan areas reliably hitting gigabit. Even if it's not in your vision for the final product of DeoVR/SLR, it's currently the only way for a great many of your subscribers who are here for scripts to experience any real semblance of your vision. Unless it requires significant development resources just to keep the function, dropping it seems needlessly purist and clearly gives the impression that you just don't much care about the customer base.
If it's a cynical business move, that's all well and good too. Business is business. But you should really re-run that risk-reward analysis. Even if your goal is to minimize the number of people who dip in and dip out for content and maximize consistent monthly subscribers, dramatically reducing your potential customer base is not the way to go about it. Netflix to this day still has a DVD-by-mail service. Granted, that service is a shell of its former self, but that's because it was allowed to slowly die out as interest in the streaming side and, more importantly, the ability to engage with the streaming side at all became more widespread. The difference, of course, being that Netflix customers have largely been satisfied with 1080 and sometimes even 720p. In the VR industry, the standard--and thus technical requirements--are far higher.
If there is a time to abandon DLNA (and not implement SMB), that time is well into the future. You perhaps have your ultimate vision/business strategy, but the infrastructure does not currently exist to support it, and the (clearly) very large portion of your userbase that will be affected by the change aren't in any position to change that. Nobody is moving to the city for porn, and we certainly can't start laying down our own fiber (though, as I've mentioned earlier, even a fiber optic connection is currently insufficient much of the time). And frankly, even many of the people who can pull it off won't bother to switch between two players.
You often hear about how piracy is spurred more by convenience and accessibility than money? Well, this is what they're talking about. You're about to push a bunch of people back onto the seas of illegitimacy (if they are able to participate at all). And given the significant backlash to a single Reddit comment that most people using your service are likely totally oblivious to, it seems safe to say this is a significant area of demand in the market that you are currently filling. If you vacate it...Someone else is going to step in. All it takes is one of them partnering with HereSphere or Pigasus or something like that, and there's going to be a new big fish in town. This isn't a question of proprietary technology; if you give up your hold on this niche, someone else is absolutely going to take it eventually. And even if they don't have SLR Originals, well, at least they'll be usable.
I dunno, I just don't see how this makes sense. Unless maintaining the functionality you've already implemented is really an extreme burden (not sure how it would be), it's a big risk for a small benefit. Please, for everyone's benefit, reconsider.
You know what? Forget EVERYTHING I said last night in the other thread about the UI. If the plan is honestly to do away with streaming downloaded files over users' local networks altogether, then don't even worry about the UI, because SLR will barely have a user base left at that point for it to even matter if the UI ever becomes less clunky.
Now I feel like I shouldn't have even bothered typing all of that out, because this is about the dumbest, most shooting-onesself-in-the-foot-ish move these guys could possibly do to themselves. Utter naive idiocy to think that a majority of their current/prospective customers are going to be satisfied with only the option to stream over internet. Even living in an area with excellent infrastructure and a gigabit fiber connection and literally NOTHING else in my house using any measurably-notable bandwidth, there are times when even a 2min preview comes with a couple of hesitations & down-rezzing. Give me a break. Nobody is dumping money into VR headsets and GPUs to drive them(and, for most of us, storage space for locally-networked media), only to have someone try to tell them that they're going to have to settle for being bottlenecked by their internet availability/reliability(which, in most cases, aren't even up to the consumer), as well as that of the streaming servers themselves(which, again, don't always seem up to the task as is...but, sure, let's just push the entire user base to it...). And, for the record, no, it's not "everyone" who's moving in that direction, at least certainly NOT YET. That's just you trying to do that. Most other players with that functionality(which is most of them) aren't even remotely discussing removing it. And, unless your larger/longer-term goal is to just put all of your eggs into the SLRO basket and you're trying to exclusively become just another full-time VR studio which offers online streaming of its own videos(which is indeed what I now suspect is the case), it's a terrible, terrible decision.
