Amazon Luna 720p Streaming Available For Unique Situations

The idea behind game streaming is to offload most of the hard work to remote servers. This means that almost any device, even a phone or a feeble HDMI streaming dongle, can play resource-intensive AAA games. There are, of course, other requirements that can't be so easily removed, like the resolution of the display you use or, more importantly, your Internet bandwidth. To make sure it gets all the combinations covered, Amazon's budding Luna game streaming is offering the somewhat ironic option to downgrade the resolution to 720p HD.

Since your computer, phone, or device won't be churning to produce the graphics, one would presumably want to play streamed games at the highest resolution that's supported by the platform. At the moment, 1080p is the bare minimum but there has been strong interest in 4K game streaming. That, however, consumes more data, and sometimes even 1080p can already be a bandwidth hog.

That's why game streaming services are recommended and launched only in territories with known good quality Internet connections. That's a bit of a generalization, though, and some people in those markets may not always have a stable or fast Internet all the time. It's for these "unique" Internet connection speeds and bandwidth demands that Amazon Luna is offering a new option.

In the Audio & Video Quality tab of Luna's settings, users can switch between 1080p and 720p resolutions. These options also make an estimate of how much data is consumed by each, with 720p using up 5GB per hour as against 1080p's 10GB per hour. Of course, these are just estimates but it should give users with data cap some idea of what to expect.

Noticeable is the option for 4K and its 23GB per hour consumption. That's still coming, of course, but Amazon has no news yet on when that will happen. Until then, however, those with lower bandwidth subscriptions can at least enjoy Luna more comfortably, at least at lower resolutions.