LordCrash I do wonder though why pretty much every other major VR porn studio offers a higher bitrate for their high resolution downloadable files.
It's a valid question and comparison as a consumer. The main difference is that we have a load-balancing streaming network, while other sites have a file server. Not just the bandwidth, but the servers themselves work completely differently. - I also want to note that the download files on SLR are the same files used for streaming.
You can try it at home, copy a video file over your network from one device to another.
Then set up a server that can stream to several devices at the same time, all viewing a different video.
Even with tools like Plex, it will still take you some setting up, trial and error, to make it work correctly. The PC you use as a server also will need to be quite a bit more powerful. - A 1Gbps network connection is pretty standard these days, but you can saturate it pretty easily if you have to keep all streams going at the same time. All the videos that are being streamed also have to be cached in the memory, so you now also have to worry about decking out the server with enough mem.
This is of course true for all streaming services, but even at 30Mbps per file, that's still 10 times more than other non-VR services.
I'm sure in time the bitrates will go up, but it's not as simple as starting to encode at higher rates. The network would have to expand quite substantially too. Take with that, many streaming hosts don't even allow you to stream at 30Mbps per stream, let alone 80. Then, there's the porn aspect too. There are hosts that don't want to offer porn content either. - So you're starting to get pretty limited even before you're up and running. - We even have users where their ISP doesn't allow them to watch streams at 30Mbps. They subscribe, use the service a couple of days, BAM, they're throttled. - This does happen less and less, however. But it's perfectly legal in the USA with the abolishment of net neutrality. (Unless it changed again, I don't follow it really)
The ideal solution would be how Google (youtube) and Netflix work, having servers inside the ISP networks of the customers. This doesn't cost the ISP much, if anything. When an ISP has to traffic data outside their own network, it costs them money.
