Netflix has announced that they will start offering 4K video streaming next month beginning with their exclusive series, “House of Cards”. 4K has been a hot topic since 4K TVs are popping up everywhere now, and their prices have been coming down quickly to more of an affordable state. The problem has always been the availability of 4K media. Until now, you pretty much have been limited to test/sample Blu-rays and a small handful of Blu-ray movies.
This is going to help push a move to 4K as additional models hit the market. Of course, you have to keep in mind that in order to receive anything in 4K, you will have to have a 4K TV. Without one, you will be stuck with 1080p as normal. If you don’t have a ton of money to dish out, you may want to wait until next year before you start looking at prices. Then again, with more models hitting the $3500-5000 range, there have been a significant increase in 4K TV sales already.
Netflix is able to make this push due to the new H.265 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) format, allowing them to push twice as much data than normal.
They said you will also need to have a high speed internet package that can receive at least 12-15 Mbps, which for a lot of people can be tough thanks to the various monopoly choke holds companies have throughout the nation. Although the US doesn’t rate at the top for high speed internet, more states are catching up (slowly) and should be able to offer this speed. Hopefully next year we will see a MUCH higher average due to the push in streaming technologies both in video game and movie/TV content. Only time will tell.
