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Netflix To Charge More For 4K Video
Mr D from 63 points out that watching Netflix in Ultra high-definition is going to cost you a little extra per month. A higher-resolution, 4K stream from Netflix will cost more. The company has boosted its monthly price for streaming ultrahigh-definition television and movies to $11.99 per month, citing the higher expenses associated with that content. In May, Netflix announced that its original series, such as House of Cards, would be available to stream in the 4K format, which offers roughly four times the resolution of current high-def TVs.
To me that doesn't seem like a bad deal. 3 bux more for 4k video, sounds good . Now only if there was alot of 4k video available
Similiar to 1080p a few years ago, 2160p is a huge financial burden on infrastructure (assuming suitable bitrates for the resolution, and not the same bitrate as 1080p and claiming 'but it's 4k!' and charging more.)
Something a lot of people forget in regards to 1080p/2160p is that it's not twice the bandwidth, it's four times, since it's essentially 4 1920x1080 images arranged in a square.
That said: Who the fuck wants to stream 2160p medium? I personally haven't found benefit from 720p and given that few of my monitors support 1080p there's no benefit to streaming at that resolution, especially given the mean quality of video entertainment available nowadays.
I've had to put my settings to 'Standard' to keep my ISP happy with bandwidth requirements.
It is good enough. I can barely tell the difference.
If I had a home theater with a 10'x20' screen, it might be different (thats 5632x11264 ping pong balls, or .0014x.0028 Manhattans from my conversion chart).
im still waiting for someone to explain to me why 4k isnt a complete fucking joke
4k is just a buzzword. They'd be better off having higher quality 1080 streams, right now they're highly compressed. Higher quality 1080 would appeal to MANY more people given the adoption rate of 1080 over 4k.
Their ISP and storage costs will increase to handle the new format and you have to pay for that somehow.
At least they have 4k content.
how are these ISPs that implement monthly caps going to keep doing that in the face of all these huge video files? seems like they have to abandon it completely at some point...
I once bought a DVD in a shop. Turned out it contained fictitious stuff that was pretty much useless by any scientific standard.
Now I download my fairy tales through some Swedish website.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Netflix To Charge More For 4K Video
How much more is Comcast going to charge me? How many 4K videos can you watch with a 300Gish monthly cap?
Seems like a reasonable way to do price discrimination. With 4K, you don't get a lot of an improvement feature-wise (and I doubt streaming is much more costly for Netflix). But 4K TVs and projectors are pretty expensive so they tend to be owned by people with high income (and higher willingness to pay). So it's an easy way to charge people with a higher willingness to pay a little more. ECON 101 tells you that price discrimination will increase the supplier's profit as compared to a single market price.
This is clearly, blatantly, a problem with the lack of net neutrality. Don't give up the fight now. Write to your congresscritters.
SMH
Now I can fully enjoy 4k video from the totally comfortable distance of 5 feet in front of my 55" television.
http://s3.carltonbale.com/reso...
It has to be mentioned....
So Netflix can charge more for higher bandwidth services but ISPs cannot?
Shouldn't Netflix stream the movie, in the format I want, for the same price?
A bit off-topic but strange, Netflix officially removed the Linux block after the release of Chrome 38 and all the NSS updates this week. And we didn't even get a Slashdot story on this.
Sure 4k might be great, but what shows, what viewing experience, will really be enhanced by this? House of Cards? I'm not sure. It's like TV stations boasting that they have the News in high-def. It's the fucking News. Some of the best high-def episodes I've seen have been on the show Nature on PBS and I imagine that the viewing experience of nature, adventure and science-fiction shows will be enhanced -- Defying Gravity looks great up-scaled to high-def -- but other shows... eh.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
TFA says it has happened, but when I check my account and try to make a change to my streaming plan, all three options are still listed at $7.99 per month. So does anyone actually know when the price increase is to occur?
Seems a possibility at least, it's going to buy them anywhere from 25 to 50% bandwidth reductions once adopted. Admittedly only for customers with a modern machine / software to decode it but we may see the adoption of it quicker than we saw the switch from mpeg2 to mpeg4.
They charge more for BD, so why wouldn't they charge more for 4K? It's a good opportunity for them to be able to raise fees.
-Daniel
I've been watching 4K on my shimian korean 2560x1440 monitor. Waiting for gaming 4K 120hz models with ati compatible gsync comes down in price.
Even at 2560x1440 its a noticeable improvement over a 1080P blueray.
I cant wait for netflix to offer 4k streams, even on my lower than 4k rez monitor its worth it.
Not going to matter when comcast implements data caps. Seriously.
105down? At a 300 or 500gig cap? With 4k video?
You're gonna have a bad time.
This is getting ridiculous, 720p(crystal clear image) looks pretty damn good on my tv, 1080p awesome, and now we are pushing 4k streaming, for what? I think 8k will be out in 2 years from now and even by then internet bandwidth wont be improved. People in this decade have become graphical(gaming) and resolution whores. Netflix, complete fucking idiots for pushing 4k when there are bottleneck(Verizon wont upgrade their hardware to handle the mass load, it's not throttling) issues.
with a bitrate higher than "shitty"?
p measures stand for "progressive", which is related to height. K measures, on the other hand, refer to width, where K means thousand pixels. In digital cinema, 4K is 4096 pixels wide, but only 3840 of those make it to consumer equipment.
You can fit damn near every movie created in 4k on less than a $1000 worth of hardrives
Including movies shot on 35mm film and scanned from the negative at 4K?
I love the idea of folks with money to burn subsidizing my subscription. Even if my rates are not directly lowered, extra income would allow Netflix to purchase better catalog and build out infrastructure. Would gladly go 720p only for further rate cut.
A. Netflix is available on demand.
B. Netflix doesn't have commercials.
C. Netflix costs less than my cable bill.
D. Netflix offers high def content on pretty much any device that can display it.
And now, for only $11.99 a month... I can get some awesomely better HD service?
Sure glad I don't have Comcast, or care about watching NBC, CBS, FOX, .etc, or any television.
What I'm getting at here is: Netflix has a business model that is cheap for consumers, gives them (mostly) what they want, and turns a fat profit for themselves.
Maybe I'm confused, but why do people still pay for television service?
You have twice as many pixels on each axis, so 4x as many pixels on screen but resolution is only 2x higher.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
for watching on a Wii?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Ooooh 4k! What an impressive buzz word! Unfortunately, I feel like it might not be quite 1 gigabit per second filling it. Here's an example. If I give you a small container filled with peanut butter, you'd be sort of happy. If I give you a gigantic container with a big, flashy title and the fill it with horse manure, you actually were better off with the smaller container. 4K is a resolution. It's just a container. I care about the pixels inside of it. When Direct TV's "HD" signal had to display confetti falling at the superbowl, 1920x1080 @ 30 effective FPS @ about 2 megabits = pixels the size of cats. Seriously, I saw 1 inch wide pixels. It's a static bitrate so for the encoding, pixels that don't move are lower quality and ones that do move are higher quality. When they're all moving, it looks like a 1996 dial up streaming video. In fact, with downscaling (since nobody owns 4k monitors) you'd actually get a better overall quality with 8 megabits per second crammed into 1080 than you would with it crammed into 4k.
Please.
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..now I might be able to afford 1080p!
The only open solution to solve this bandwidth problem is TOECDN.
http://www.toecdn.org/
If I want high resolution I'll go to the movie theater. At home I usually have Netflix movies on in the background and listen more than watch.
I can't see any obvious benefit to 1080i25 over 1080p25
Because high motion. In sports, the ball may move rapidly from one field to the next. Sending 1920x540 pixel fields at 50-60 Hz allows smoother more of the motion to be transmitted, while keeping more sharpness for slower moving things than 720p would.
Also because early HDTVs were CRT based and couldn't display a 1080-line field, though they could display a 540-line field.
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of streaming in this country. Hulu was the streaming service to own. Then the other guy came out with 3K. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called Hulu Plus. That's 3K video and 5.1 audio. For sound. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to 4K Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling 3K video and audio. 5.1 audio or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to 5K.
Sure, we could go to 4K next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make 7.1 audio and call it the HuluPlusSuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
Now they'll do what Hulu did with HuluPlus and put all the shows worth watching into the new format so that those who don't really care about or want the higher res can't watch anything current or popular. In effect forcing high res cost onto anyone who wants to use the service. I see this becoming a problem much as it has for Hulu. They've had to subsidize HuluPlus with banner ads to support it's failure to garner enough audience which is EXACTLY what the consumer DOESN'T want.
nobody asked for 4k, so if you must check off the checkbox, make people who pretend they want it pay for it.
If Netflix is going to do this, they need to make one title available to regular Netflix subscribers so they can test whether 4K streaming will work for them. If people pay and then discover that their network connections aren't up to the challenge they are going to be unhappy. Doesn't have to be a feature film; a short or a TV episode will do.
I should be able to pay less for SD content only!
Great, now my neighbors will be streaming in 4K, killing the damn RF spectrum more than they already have been doing!!!!!!!!!!!! GRRRRRRRR Life sure sucks living next to two houses full of teenagers who are streaming nearly all day long, even 2 AM they leave their streaming going on! UGHHHHHHH Such bad parents that allow this outrageous activity lol, couch potato 2.0 in training.
Anyone consider what this will do to a neighborhood with multiple neighbors who decide to stream over WiFi at 4k? Or worse, an apartment building. There goes your smartphones wifi competing for RF spectrum, or if anything it will try to compete by increasing the transmit to get it's signal heard killing your battery that much faster.
The need for more WiFi spectrum may be rapidly approaching. They need to make a specification that doesn't allow channel bonding, something that is optimized for multiple connected devices that all can get a respectable speed and doesn't allow a small few to consume it all.