Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Last month, I bought a 47" LG 3D HDTV, one of those Smart TVs, with Google TV installed. I like to watch things BIG, not on an Android phone or on a Kindle. Big and CLEAR. This Qello app was included on the home screen of the TV, and as a person who enjoys watching concerts at home, I thought this was just the thing. Because image quality counts, that Qello asserted that the concerts were in HD was a strong selling point. Unfortunately, the actuality falls far short the description. Here's the skinny. Like others here, I started with just whatever Qello was offering free. I tried a few titles, and, just as another customer reported in his review, I was unable to access full concerts, and was instead limited to a single song from that concert, and I didn't have a choice of what the song was. Sometimes it wasn't a song at all, but some sort of promotional video for the concert. Not only that, the video quality was NOT as advertised. Not only was it not in HD, the picture was below average, for any medium. But, I thought, maybe that's because I'm not a subscriber. Perhaps as a subscriber, I'll get access to the advertised higher resolution. There's a 7-day free trial, so I subscribed to Qello, after which I returned to sampling various items from the inventory, again mostly concerned about image quality. The streaming quality was no better than before I subscribed. Clearly there is some misrepresentation going on here. Within a couple of hours of subscribing, my decision was sealed: I unsubscribed and I deleted the app from my TV. However, this morning, my bank account was debited the subscription fee anyway. Because the $4.99 isn't worth fighting over (this time), I thought I'd give Qello a second look. So I accepted what happened and turned to it again, and after several hours of looking at what Qello actually offers, my opinion grew only more harsh. And more specific. Let me cover the image quality in detail, to convince you that mine is an opinion you can trust. You've probably been to YouTube and noticed that there are times when the video format is distorted, stretched one way or the other, due to incompatibility issues between the original image format and the way YouTube is processing it. Some of the videos I watched on my TV from Qello were like that, an image originally formatted at 4:3 stretched out to the edges of my 16:9 screen. To accomplish this, the image has to be pulled wider. Maybe it won't bother some people, but it bothers me. NO, this was NOT due to a setting on my TV. It's the way the video itself is delivered to the TV and there's nothing to be done about it. When I watch, say, Netflix, and there's an old movie or TV series that's 4:3, my TV puts the picture squarely in the middle of the screen, black bars on either side, so that the image is not distorted. Also, you've seen at YouTube videos that are blurry or splotchy, when the picture deteriorates due to a very low resolution or a low bit rate or limited bandwidth. This same phenomenon was constantly present, to some degree, with the Qello concerts I watched, especially where there was a lot of movement. The image might assemble itself to a watchable level, but it was still murky, and nowhere near steady. The conclusion is, the claim that the videos are streamed in HD quality is flat-out false. After observing all of that, I decided to experiment. Hooking my laptop to my HDTV through the HDMI cable, I brought up YouTube, and watched some of the same stuff I watched through Qello. A specific example was Madonna's STICKY AND SWEET show. Just like at Qello, that entire show is available at YouTube, all in one file, the same exact video. The image produced on my TV from my laptop was of identical quality as that from Qello. My setup actually beat out Qello, because it loaded faster and was easier to control; for instance, selecting where I wanted to go on the timeline by using the cursor at the bottom of YouTube's viewer, which isn't possible in Qello. In fact, it's noteworthy that anything I saw on Qello I also found on YouTube. This got me to thinking that Qello probably doesn't have an actual inventory, and is instead accessing YouTube's servers, perhaps paying a fee to do so, and then presenting the titles through Qello's interface, thus giving us the impression that Qello is the originating entity. I'm almost positive that's the case. Whatever's going on, Qello's videos are low quality and not intended to be viewed on large screens: they are NOT high definition images. Period. That this app appeared among the other apps provided with the TV was mistaken by me as an endorsement from LG. I know now that it's not. My final assessment of the service is this: I'm not going to renew my subscription at the end of the thirty days. And the next time, if, after I cancel, I'm charged anyway (and that is currently a concern), I am going to fight over the $4.99. I don't care how deep the library is, I'm not going to be using this service. The image quality is too poor and, from what I've seen, I can see the same stuff at YouTube. Why someone would want to watch concerts on a cellphone is beyond me, but if you're into that, Qello's shortcomings might be acceptable to you. To those of you looking to watch concerts on your large HDTV, there's nothing for YOU here. _____________________________________________________________________________