I watched the first 10 minutes of The Long Night back to back using both iTunes and HBO Now, they both looked about the same. I could tell what was going on with both.
Season 8 is now available on iTunes. I haven't checked it yet, but the episode "The Long Night" may finally be more viewable now than it was on HBO since the iTunes version would probably be better bitrate.
I enjoyed it very much, I was intentionally spoiled on this and I'm not sure if I liked more or less as a result. The execution was better than I was expecting based on the spoilers (all of which were true).
I've hated Dany for 3 seasons now, I was expecting her to break but not as bad as she did. And the reason Jon won't return her affections is entirely the aunt thing. I was most upset with Jaime actually returning to King's Landing to be with Cersei. I thought he has changed more than that.
Last week the scorpions took out a badly injured dragon who wasn't expecting to be in danger. This week they weren't able to take out a healthy dragon who knew to be on the look out. I think this is the difference in the effectiveness these two weeks.
Throughout the past 2 seasons Dany's advisors kept talking her out of just burning King's Landing. Dany just lost too much to keep her from doing that.
If a character needs to be assassinated it is a good bet that the character who has been training to be an assassin for 8 seasons would be the one to do it. That being said I don't expect Arya to kill Cersei now when I would have a week ago. I don't see her killing both Cersei and the Night King.
Part of the problem with the streaming quality probably had to do with millions of people trying to watch the stream at once last night. It is probably better now. And my calibration posts were addressing the complaints of it being too dark. I actually had more problems with SOLO being too...
Your display doesn't have to be professionally calibrated. Using a setup disc like Disney WOW or Spears and Munsil should get you enough of the way there. This episode didn't look great but if your display is set up well you should be able to at least make out what is happening and to whom.
The image was comprehensible if you properly set up your display with a calibration disc or if your screen is professionally calibrated. I could tell what was going on the entire episode on my projector, my problem was compression artifacts and the stream dropping in resolution. If your...
I called that
Wonderful episode, I think I enjoyed it more than End Game which I liked quite a lot. And yes the streaming quality was terrible, the stream switched to SD in the middle of the episode.