For a small to medium displays at typical viewing distances (this includes most "big screen" panels you can buy at your local electronics shop), 1080p meets or exceeds the limits of the typical human eye's resolving power. Without using a projection system and a large screen or a stupendously expensive (>100" diagonal) flat-panel, 4K is a subtle upgrade at best.<p>When video is encoded with insufficient bandwidth, compression artifacts (e.g. macroblocking) are anything but subtle. These artifacts typically are not constrained to one or two pixels, but ramify to much larger portions of the image. Netflix has, by necessity, used insufficient bandwidth on practically their entire library. My money is on Netflix's over-compressed 4K being inferior in quality to Bluray 1080p for the vast majority of users.
I'm old enough to remember tv shows making a big deal about being in color, then stereo, then HD. The big change in going to 4K is that Netflix doesn't need regulatory permission or ten years of drafting standards to make the upgrade.
The biggest problem holding back adoption for 4k media is vendor lock in. You can't get 4K unless you're on a Sony/LG/Samsung "Smart TV".<p>There is not a legitimate technical reason why I can't watch House of Cards in 4K on my Seiki through my PC. I watched the trailer in 4K over a dozen times on YouTube.<p>Gamers want to play games on low input lag 4K screens from brands like Asus, Dell, Acer. 4K is much more easily justifiable when users can buy a single screen for their games and ultra-hd content.<p>Gaming PC's are about the only units with enough compute for highly compressed h.265 playback without built in hardware acceleration, so I don't understand why the market has not made this content accessible for me to purchase.
How many GB/min of footage is this? I can't imagine ever being able to stream that here, where our high-end quotas are measured in 100s of GB/month.
Netflix; I dont need that, we already watched it. It was great.<p>Please add more shows to the EU/Dutch region.. the US and UK catalog are interesting.. why cant we see this?<p>Also, i'd pay extra if i could watch ANY movie as soon as it got out of the theatre.
Wait, my back of the envelope says you'll need to pull down around 650mb a second to stream 4K. That's uncompressed, sure, but anything in that power of ten isn't feasible.
Too bad their 4k content has bitrates that should only be acceptable for 1080p or less. Downscaling their 4k to 1080p would almost look as good as if they just had proper 1080p to begin with. And a proper 1080p upscale to 4k would look better than this poor excuse for 4k.