I said in Thursday's post that I should not have chosen Stan as my streamer to watch
. How right I was*, and how many other choices I didn't realize I actually had.
(*read on, there's more to this story)
Suspecting but never definitively proving that the video quality on Stan was worse than on my other streamers, I decided to do a little test. And the results of that test were definitive indeed (*but maybe not in the way I originally thought).
I'm calling it the "Pepsi Challenge," a bit of a misnomer but I'll explain my thinking.
In the actual Pepsi Challenge from the 1980s -- and was it this that prompted Coke to roll out the ill-fated "New Coke"? -- people tasted unidentified colas to determine which one they liked the best. There may have been more than two, or it may have just been Coke and Pepsi. Allegedly, a lot of people decided they liked Pepsi better. And, speaking of things that stayed in the zeitgeist, as I was when talking about Eat Pray Love, so did the Pepsi Challenge, as seen in such places as Pulp Fiction: "I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that Amsterdam shit."
My Pepsi Challenge does not have the same blind element in that I already knew which streamer was which, and I already had a bias going in. However, it does involve comparing like things to see which is the best. Plus, there would be less inherent subjectivity to it. While it's a personal assessment what flavor of soda you like the best, the crispness of an image, in most cases, is not a matter of preference.
So first I checked to see if Eat Pray Love was available on one of my other streamers. It was. Amazon.
Then I decided to watch the first few minutes of the movie, just to get an idea of how much better I thought it looked.
Then I decided I would actually take a picture of the same scene from both movies, one on Amazon and one on Stan, to make a side-by-side comparison all the easier.
There was no comparison.
Before I show you the pictures, I'll tell you I selected this particular scene because it was a party Julia Roberts' character attends early on -- in theory, where she starts to get the idea she's not happy. An indoor scene, making the lighting all the more important to get right. This was the where I noticed how dark the movie looked. I particularly wanted a shot featuring Viola Davis, because her complexion makes the phenomenon all the more pronounced, as when the image is as dark as I perceived it to be during my viewing, you basically lose the ability to distinguish the features on her face.
So I paused the movie at the 4:26 mark on Amazon and here's what I got:
I believed this was much brighter than my experience had been with Eat Pray Love. You can see the details of Davis' face just fine. However, I need to go back into Stan to be sure.
Oh no.
Never mind that I didn't get the depth of the shot just right. By comparison, the image on Stan is, frankly, awful looking. The right side of Davis' face is completely indiscernible. I've heard that due to their complexions, it is especially important to light Black actors correctly, otherwise this is what happens.
On a lark, I decided to see if Eat Pray Love was also available on Netflix. It was.
If we were looking for infinitesimal differences between two like products, as Pepsi was in its comparisons with Coke, the only contest here would be between Amazon and Netflix. These two images look slightly different, but the preference on which one is better could reasonably be in the eye of the beholder.
Whereas Stan would finish a distant, distant third -- or perhaps fourth, behind the option of not watching the movie at all.
There is one other thing I haven't even told you about this. When I started watching Eat Pray Love the other night, I did try to fix the image within the movie, after I'd been watching it for maybe 20 minutes. I determined that Stan allows you to adjust the video quality between the settings of Low, Medium, High and Auto, to optimize your experience based on the speed of your internet. Ours was set to Auto by default, so I changed it to High. I noticed a slight uptick in the quality, but not to Netflix or Amazon levels.
Perversely, I also watched a few seconds of this movie in both Low and Medium. Lordy.
I am now asking myself:
Can I even watch movies on Stan anymore? Should we even still be subscribing to it?
There is no doubt that I like having this extra streamer available as an option for when I'm looking for a movie I can't otherwise find, and that Stan has come through for me in the past. Just earlier this week, I learned that my #1 of 2024, The Substance, will begin streaming on Stan starting ... well, starting today in fact. I thought this was my occasion to finally show the movie to my wife.
But can I even do that if it's going to look like this?
Here's the biggest problem: As a critic, I rely on having no details that are beyond the control of the filmmakers impacting my ability to assess the film. You can already see how this has failed me with regards to Eat Pray Love. In my post Thursday, I mentioned the lighting problems multiple times. Fortunately, I did also mention my suspicion that Stan could be part of the problem, as I already had reason to suspect this. More on that in a minute.
As it turns out, those lighting problems had nothing to do with how Ryan Murphy shot the movie. They only had to do with how Stan projected it.
Stan does not show a huge number of original films, though I did use it last year to watch and rank the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian, which I did not happen to review. But let's say I had reviewed Arcadian. I might have spent some valuable real estate in the review dinging the movie for a thing that was not its fault. I don't think Arcadian would have been a good movie no matter where it was projected, but being projected on Stan certainly did it no favors.
Similarly, I don't think I would have liked Eat Pray Love much better no matter where I'd seen it. But I can't be sure. With movies, a first impression often sticks with you. And my first impression of Eat Pray Love was of a dark movie that looked bad.
This is a worry that has come up for me before related to sound. I remember specifically discussing it (on this blog, I think) in relation to Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino, which had an unfortunate mix between its music and its dialogue such that you had to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue and then rush to turn it down again any time the music came on. At the time, I wondered if there was any way to know whether this was the movie's fault or if it had something to do with my TV or other aspect of my individual viewing experience. Fortunately, another person independently confirmed they'd had the same experience with this movie.
But as a critic, I don't want to be constantly confirming my impressions of movies with other people. I want to know I've got a high-quality streamer presenting it, like Netflix or Amazon.
But I also don't like to give up on products that I have subscribed to and in many ways like. I am actually involved in a similar problem with my tennis club right now, poor service and considering not renewing my membership, but vastly preferring the option to renew.
So I decided to dig deeper on this.
I looked back into our viewing history on Stan. At first I actually did this to see how much we were really using the service, but then that morphed into something else.
And this discovered for me that in the past year, I have watched exactly seven other movies on Stan: Throw Momma from the Train a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Arcadian, three Halloween movies when I was watching those during October, a revisit of The Crow in preparation for watching the new version, and a random revisit of The Truman Show.
Seven movies in a year is not a lot for paying a monthly subscription fee. Of course, I am not the only one who uses Stan. My younger son randomly binged the entire Henry Danger series last year, most of which he had already seen, and my wife has watched a half-dozen series in that year, most notably Hacks. There's value in that.
But there may not be continuing value for me. Even when I watched The Crow, I remember thinking it did not look very good, though I think I put that on my memory of the movie. The weird skipping forward and doubling back by a second or two, which happened a number of times throughout the movie? Well of course that was on Stan.
I thought I might do the Pepsi Challenge on The Truman Show, but of course, this one was not available on either Amazon or Netflix. Thereby clarifying the conundrum I am in about the service Stan provides me.
But I did decide to click into it to see if the "Stan effect" was visible here. Indeed, it did not look great, though obviously I had not noticed it at the time I watched it last year. That assessment could have been complicated by the fact that I was watching it on my projector, so it was reasonable to imagine there would be differences in the projection.
The experience of watching movies has to do in large measure with the quality of how they look. That may be an obvious statement, but I'm making it anyway. A good script can drag a movie past its visual components, but it needn't. Movies are first and foremost a visual medium.
So, in light of the definite value I get from a movie like The Truman Show -- not to mention the three Halloween movies that were not available to me any other way, and now The Substance -- I took this whole thing one step further and contacted Stan customer support, including the three stills of Eat Pray Love you see above.
Their first response was to tell me my email address was not associated with a Stan account and to provide further information to prove I was a customer. I was a little annoyed by this, but I get it. They don't want to invest time in a customer unless they know it's really a customer. I intentionally did not provide the additional information about myself because it would still not match up to anything in their system, only telling them the account was associated with my wife's email address, and providing them that address. I did this in part to see if they would come back to me again to prove I was associated with the account holder, as at this point, Stan's customer service, or lack thereof, might be a factor in whether we keep it or not.
They then sent another response asking me to cc in my wife, so yeah, I guess that was sort of the thing I didn't want them to do. But I guess I have to admit I still get it, and sure, this approach is more secure for us. When I responded and cc'd her in, they then responded again (different person this time) confirming what the first person said about needing to verify. Getting more annoyed. Also, when that second person replied, they forgot to cc my wife so I had to reply again, ccing her again. The guy replied apologizing for not ccing her, but then also did not cc her on that response. I guess the net result is a state of annoyance remaining constant.
My wife replied and things were finally allowed to go forward.
Finally they said they could not duplicate this in their analytics and asked what our TV model number is. I replied.
A third person (they work in shifts, and I do appreciate someone keeping the thread live while the others are off) got back to me and asked if the same issue were happening on any other devices.
Duh. I'm an IT guy and I didn't even think to check this.
So then I did watch a little bit of Eat Pray Love on Stan on my laptop, and this time, it looked fine. I mean, it looked equivalent to how the other services looked. The way Ryan Murphy filmed it. Which also explains why my wife, who tends to watch Stan through her devices, does not notice the things I've noticed.
Okay, so this is some sort of interaction effect between Stan and my TV. Maybe we can blame the intermediary, which would be Fetch, the conduit through which we access a lot of other TV-related things on our HDMI2 port. I suppose it's like an AppleTV.
We actually do also have AppleTV, but unfortunately, it's through my U.S. iTunes (which I need to keep in order to access movies that have not been released here yet) and therefore I can't get the Stan app in the app store.
Well at least now I know what I'm working with. And I know that Stan is not just some purveyor of shoddy streams.
Stan support responded again (they're right on it, really) asking me to go to a URL on my TV to run a speed test. I tried and tried but I can't figure out how to type in a URL on my TV. So I did the native speed test on Fetch, which came back fine. I told them this.
And then a lightbulb went off, and I finally started to really think like an IT guy -- on my own this time, without the prompting of anyone else.
I thought, if Fetch is the problem, I'll see this problem also when I go on Netflix through Fetch, rather than through the native Netflix app on my TV. I can't get Stan through AppleTV, which I had hoped to do to put it on a level playing field with Amazon Prime. But I can go the other way around, signing into Netflix on Fetch.
And you know what? Eat Pray Love looked like shit on Netflix through the Fetch box, too.
So now, ultimately, Stan is completely exonerated in this. Fetch is the shoddy service, or maybe it's just something about the settings. I've already gone through and tried to tweak a lot of settings that I think could relate, to no avail. But at least now I know for sure where the problem lies.
The scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, but also, knowing all the variables you can and should change to get your answers. I do this without even thinking about it in IT, and now I've finally done it at home too.
The Pepsi Challenge is a useful starting point, but you have to know what it is that you're actually comparing. I thought I was comparing streamers, when I was actually comparing ... digital media players, is I guess the right way to refer to AppleTV and Fetch, as I just discovered from the internet.
You may be able to tell this post was written partially in real time, as I got the first part of it out without knowing what the problem was, before coming around to the right answer in the end. If I'd done all of this before I started writing, I surely would have structured this post differently. But I can't be bothered to toss all the writing I've already done and start anew.
However, I think there's something useful about having gone through this the way I did, in terms of where I ended up. Maybe if I hadn't been writing about it, and feeling like I demanded a definitive answer for you, my reader, I wouldn't have gone the extra steps that helped me put my finger on the true problem here.
And Stan -- poor, innocent Stan -- might have gone bye bye.
Now, if I can just figure out how to get a good Stan stream through Fetch in order to watch The Substance ...