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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.
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.
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.
Caps get increased as the typical user uses more bandwidth. I used to get nasty notes from Comcast due to a lot of video downloading, but haven't since streaming video became popular, and led to the average user using just as much bandwidth as I do.
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?
Because it hurts those poor ISPs so much when they are forced to charge you an overage fee...
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. . . .
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.
Netflix would be streaming a video that may take 4x the bandwidth and 4x the storage for them to keep around, so I'd be paying them to do more.
My ISP is being paid to transfer a capped volume of data to me at as close as possible to the speed that I'm paying for. If they increase that cap or increase my max transfer rate, then we can start talking about them getting paid more as well. Otherwise, it's not an equivalent comparison.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
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.
Comcast hasn't been able to go below 300 GB because of customer threats to switch to FiOS where available.
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.
When you are construction yob you instrument demand all of the supererogatory forbear that you can get. Pregnancy slim works rapidly to ply you get rid of fat and add strength assemblage. There are no special requirements. All you person to do is a few unanalyzable things. Ketone Slim XT
4K does not have 4x the resolution. I don't care what sounds sexier, there's truth in advertising and 4K is only twice as sharp. You want 4x sharper, you need 8K and don't worry, once you've spent a good chunk of cash on the 4K set, they'll be there telling you it is obsolete and you need to upgrade again to 8K because, because, oh whatever, give us more money you peasant!
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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.
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.
but but... the quality is better, I can now see the expiration date on the license plate when I smash my eyeball into the screen
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.