Another huge benefit is you can actually get high-bitrate streaming. Ripping a 4k Blu-ray & streaming it from home (for those who may not want to sail the seas) is sooooo much higher quality than typical streaming.

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Gigachad 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It is so sad how with the internet we have accepted terrible media quality. Instant messaging and social media reduces photos to 1MP and heavily compressed. It's fine for a photo or meme you are only looking at once and scrolling past. But if it's something you'd want to save, the quality is garbage.

I'd honestly rather apps stop providing hosted media and just do the delivery, let me worry about backing up history. iMessage seems to be the only one sending things in full quality.

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watermelon0 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The main difference is that iMessages count towards iCloud quota, whereas (most?) other messaging services have free storage.

	▲	Gigachad 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		iMessage doesn't require you to store history in icloud, it can just store everything locally if you want. But yes, I'd rather not have stored history, or the option to pay for storage than to have all media crushed beyond recognition. A few times I've wanted to print something and found it was sent over an IM app and compressed to 100kb rendering it useless.