Number of HBO and HBO Max subscribers rises to 76.8 million – Image and sound – News

Accelerated playback has to do with the frame rates.
Most of the content is recorded at 24fps: cinema format.
In Europe this is accelerated to 25fps, because our TVs run on this. You hardly hear it unless you compare it to each other.
In the USA, however, this has to go to 30fps, which is too much to speed up, there they do a 3:2 pulldown. This means that you make 5 frames from 4 frames, by interlacing 2 of these 5 frames with each other. Interlacing is out of date, so this is blended/blurred: showing 2 frames at the same time by mixing them with each other.
So in Europe: 4% faster playback, or in the USA: 40% blurred image.

However, if you don’t do this and leave it at 24fps, you can hope that your TV will handle this well.
TV’s that can’t play this then in Europe, every second 1 frame double. That comes across as faltering. In the USA this happens 6x per second, and is much worse.

Now you have to ask yourself what HBO wants: Users with a good picture, but also users with a stuttering picture. Or users where it always goes well, but which is lower in quality. The latter option is probably better for them: fewer complaints.

In my opinion, they would have both variants put on the server and let the user choose, but of course this takes more work for HBO, and storage space.

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