Normally it’s the everyday net users that are the first to complain about speed problems holding back the way they use the internet, but every now and again a bigger company or organisation will point out problems with the net infrastructure in the UK. Spotify is the latest company to note that their services have to be limited in the country purely because of the average speed of net users and low availability of proper high speed net access.
Spotify is one of the biggest free internet music services ever, and offers literally millions of tracks from popular artists completely free of charge, supported by advertisements. Currently the service sends the music out in a basic quality of 128 kbps with premium users being able to access the music at 320 kbps. With cheap speakers most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this and CD quality music, but with more expensive set ups a much higher quality would be very desirable.
Spotify’s Vice President of Products, Gustav Soderstrom said:
“This has more to do with the user experience based on current broadband and mobile internet networks. Streaming lossless files would consume very large amounts of bandwidth for people.
It would also make Spotify much more prone to a bad user experience, with problems such as stuttering and the like, which is something that we pride ourselves in not having at all. Higher audio quality with a bad user experience is not an option for us.”
We can see where Spotify is coming from, and it really highlights just how poor Europe actually sees the UK broadband service; nearly as poorly as we do ourselves. However, in this situation it seems like Spotify are being overly cautious. Surely it’s up to the end user of the program to decide if their connection speeds and bandwidth can handle FLAC streaming. After all, even YouTube can stream HD video now.