so I found myself getting the netflix again for some reason. One thing I noticed is they've got the anime Hajime no Ippo, which I have on blu-ray from Discotek. Netflix listed it as being in HD, so I was curious as to what masters they were using. Ippo doesn't have a nativve HD transfer (it's animated on film in the tail end of that being the practice, and edited on tape, so the master tapes are pretty good SD component video) and when Discotek put it out they'd been given an HD upscale provided by the licensor as well as the existing SD english materials with the dub that Geneon used for their DVD release. From what I recall hearing from Discotek's production staff, the supplied upscale looked bad, but since the Geneon dub masters were good they just upscaled those and IVTC'd to 24p and tbh it comes out looking pretty good albeit with English credits. So obviously I was wondering, did Netflix get Discotek's upscale? I played the episode and the immediate answer was "no" because Japanese credits, and as I let it play I also noticed that there was a lot of jaggy improperly deinterlaced bits on motion. So I have a suspicion that Netflix just used the masters that Discotek had rejected - and I guess being crummily deinterlaced is why Discotek had rejected them.
Is this emblematic of the lack of care large streaming services take in their product as compared to boutique home video labels? Yes, yes it is. And also I just find it interesting thinking about and learning about video masters.