It is harder to tell on a screen 40inch or under though at a typical viewing distance. Just as you will (or should) with 720p vs 1080p and the rest (IE bitrate etc being equal). Put a detailed highly saturated with vivid colour scene side by side Mark and i assure you that you will see a difference. One day even the likes of FTTC will look little different to how we view ADSL today, which will of course happen a lot sooner if you’re currently on a slower/longer line. It could also serve as an early warning sign for operators.

Incidentally Sony’s 4K movies come in at around 45-60GB (GigaBytes) per flick! Never the less Netflix expects to introduce 4K before the technology itself becomes mass market and this, claims Hastings, should give ISPs plenty of time to adapt.īut when can we expect this new 4K service from Netflix? Sometime in 2014. It’s worth saying that Netflix currently uses a proprietary video encoding technology from eyeIO, which is also used by Sony’s own experimental 4K service. In any case most people don’t have TV’s or monitors that could support 4K and that’s unlikely to change for a few more years. The fact is it would be very difficult to do a reasonable 4K stream at 15Mbps and even the latest H.265 video standard would struggle to achieve that, although the service hasn’t launched yet and technology is constantly improving. video streams are dynamic and some scenes will always need more speed than others) and Hastings is probably just playing it safe with 50Mbps until he knows for sure. What Hastings is really saying here is that some 4K movies may well require an even faster speed than 15Mbps (i.e.

So it’s around 15Mbps but you’ll need a 50Mbps connection? Hay.

If you’ve got a 50-megabit connection you’ll be fine.”

“ Going forward we’ll see more and more 4K, and that will work really well over the Internet. But Thinkbroadband, via way of DSL Reports that itself seems to have borrowed its own report from Multichannel, has picked up on an article that somehow slipped under our radar and references Netflix’s plan to launch a new 4K stream that would require a broadband download speed of “ around” 15Mbps (something most UK subscribers would struggle to achieve over existing ADSL and ADSL2+ lines) but you’ll probably need a lot more.

Netflix 4k films