Netflix and Samsung Stream 4K Video at CES

Nope, definetly not, when I think of streaming I think of YouTube, and alot of YouTube vids look awful.

even TV has it's artefacts that some people find annoying.

Netflix to stream 4K video? That's hilarious and it won't happen anytime soon, i.e. in the next 5 years. Customers would go over their monthly data cap after only a couple movies. Netflix can't even stream high quality 1080p yet not to mention 7.1 HD audio.

+1

I would rather get the audio before the 4k

http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/21/netflix-streaming-pal-eyeio-brings4k-10-bit-video/

I remember this little blog back in december stating that Netflix and eyeIO were working on 4k streaming. But as mentioned in the previous posts, I would much prefer HD sound at this point in time. Seems it would be possible if they're able to push 4k..

Monthly data caps keep getting trotted as some prohibitive factor in the adoption of 4K streaming. I know you probably mean it in a humorous fashion, but some have been 100% serious. I call BS on that as a factor for 4K streaming for two main reasons:

1. Who would go to the extra bother to stream 4K on a smartphone or tablet where you're not going to see the difference? I see this as purely a Home Theater hobbyist pleasure at first, early adopters and all that.

2. Who would waste their data to watch said movie on a screen they can't see the difference on? People are already keenly aware of how much their monthly data limits are (or at what point their carrier starts throttling them), so using their already precious data for something of limited to no value on a portable device (screen size of between 3.5" to 10.1").

Just my 2 cents.

Everyone is talking about home ISP's. Suddenlink is my provider and has a 150 gig cap per month. Each HD movie from Netflix is about 2-4 gigs. A 4K movie would probably be around 10 gigs. It wouldn't take very long to go over your home ISP's cap.

I've got a $70 unlimited plan on my 12mbit connection, wouldn't worry me. I could do with 4K streaming ASAP to feed my Sony VW1000 4K. Certainly beats zero that's currently on offer. Plus it's a decent wait till Sony's hardware comes out mid year. Meantime Red have slipped on their Redray player launch date...

where is all the 4K pron?

Exactly. HD porn was the first thing to take off in the HD format. That no 4K porn has been produced is not a good indicator for 4K proliferation this year...maybe next year?

Ah. I was trying to figure out what pron was.

Lets also not forget the buffer time needed to stream 10 gigs of movie data

Agree.. needs 5.1/7.1 before 4K. Also, where does Netflix get the "source" of 4K? If it is just some upcoverted 4K from 1080p, it is not useful.

Netflix streaming 4K LMAO. They can't even get HD right. No Im not a fan of Netflix. Content being besides the point its the performance that is lacking. I had a subscription but canceled. I have fasted tier of fiber optic internet available and on my 10ft screen it looked worse than DVD. LOL no thanks.

Nobody wants to see a porn star in 4K on a UHD screen.

You don't think you'd like to see their bruises, pimples and needle marks in SUPER DUPER HD ?

I don't understand this...I hear people mention it all the time but it perplexes me because the HD 1080P from Netflix has looked stellar for me on a 100" projector screen. Maybe you have the setting on Netflix.com in account settings for streaming not set to High Quality (they put that feature there when everyone with Internet caps complained). That setting may not be set to "high" by default anymore. Also, I think someone metnioned no 5.1 – Netflix has had 5.1 audio since 2010.

Netflix is having enough trouble streaming HD at this point.

I don't know who said 5.1 but I was talking about 5.1 lossless audio.

Agreed. For a long time, Netflix had YouTube quality videos.

However, in the last 3 months, my jaws dropped when for the first time my ButtKicker2 (bass transducer) started vibrating and there was surround sound (DD5.1), along with nearly (even if not quite) Blu-Ray quality 1080p from NetFlix encoded in H.264 (instead of VC-1), streamed over the newest AppleTV with the latest firmware, at higher-than-expected bitrates.

For the first time, I couldn't see any compression artifacts this time for a WHOLE movie from a viewing distance of 2 screen widths. Some fine textures were eliminated -- but this is something that happens on some Blu-Rays encodes too, and there wasn't any artificial look. In a different movie, I'd see rare compression artifacts only once (1.5h into the movie) on a single gray gradient; but everything else; even waterfall; waterstreams, and billowing smoke looked artifact-free (the torture test material) -- pretty impressive for the less-than-BluRay bitrates being thrown at me.

An example flagship encode on Netflix is the movie "Hugo" encoded in the AppleTV-optimized H.264 format (AppleTV doesn't do VC-1, so Netflix had to do H.264 for AppleTV's) instead of the crappy Silverlight format; it is a stellar encode. It's not fully Blu-Ray quality, but the picture quality beat anything I saw on Comcast/Charter/DirectTV/Rogers/UVerse/Bell FibeTV. Even the 5Mbps encodes looked better than the 7Mbps encodes seen on UVerse/FibeTV; they are apparently using a really kick-ass codec now (every bit counts, they use a massively powerful amount of computing to encode their best streams now), and much better than most MPEG2 broadcasts (especially with those extra channels crammed together, with poor 10-12Mbps MPEG2 encodes). It will not look as good as a really good Blu-Ray 15-20Mbps encode of a really good Blu-Ray, but it does massively beat a lot of cable material. So Netflix is finally beating cable HDTV quality, on their flaship 1080p/DD5.1 streaming videos. The bit rate for Transformers 3 was also quite high by streaming standards, the movie size was almost 6 gigabytes according to my data usage meter.

Granted, there's a lot of crap; but there's enough good content that just watching 3 movies a month, pays for the Netflix subscription, in Blu-Ray rentals (especially when my spouse is insisting I watch the DVD version when the Blu-Ray is not available -- and the recent best 1080p/5.1 encodes on Netflix beat DVD by a large margin -- so guess what; I'd rather watch it on Netflix than wait a few days for an ordered Blu-Ray to arrive). The video format was H.264 rather than VC-1

If you haven't tested a recent 1080p/5.1 Netflix video (including full subwoofer audio), please obtain a *RECENT* high-quality player (don't use the Netflix built into your HDTV or Blu-Ray player) and make sure your Internet connection is at least 300% overhead (minimum 15 Mbps or faster) so the buffering is quite fast. (Buffering lasts only about 5-6 seconds)

It's nearly, but not quite fully Blu-Ray quality, but the best Netflix videos in the last 3 months does beat DVD quality by a massive margin.
(Note: I do have a 25 Mbps VDSL connection and live in a major city, so my connection is not the bottleneck.)
I try to rent the Blu-Rays whenever I can, but with Blockbusters and Rogers Video closed, it's pretty hard to rent.

It's only in the last 3 months, that I FINALLY think that Netflix is worth the money -- but you have to be selective with what you watch on it.

Criteria for "near-videophile Netflix"
- Use a device that pulls the H.264 1080p DD5.1 streams from Netflix (e.g. recent AppleTV with the November 2012+ firmware)
- Have Internet connection at least 15 Mbps for fast buffering, no low-quality starts, reliable top-bitrate streaming
- Choose the best 10% (90% of Netflix is crap). Stick to those >5Mbps 1080p bitstreams
- You aren't viewing it from 1x screen width from a 140" screen.
- Do not use WiFi (Even 11n). Use Ethernet. Makes a big difference.

Purposes:
- VOD substitute (better-than-cable-HDTV-quality)
- Satisfy the spouse who keeps insisting on watching the DVD version (Since Netflix 1080p is vastly better)
- Prevent waiting for a few days for ordered BluRays to arrive; or picking up the Blu-Rays that is sometimes not available at Best Buy, etc.

Of course, when having a big home theater party, preplan to have the Blu-Ray, but Netflix now has a place in the "semi-videophile" environment for casual watching (only became true 3 months ago); especially when faced with abysmal cable options & difficult Blu-Ray accessibility. Visually speaking, the difference between Netflix 1080p and a good Blu-Ray 1080p, is less noticeable than the difference between an anamorphic vs. non-anamorphic DVD (Google that if you're too young to remember the beginnings of "anamorphic" and "enhanced for 16x9 TVs" stuff -- more than 15 years ago)

Based on recent experience; I'm no longer laughing at Netflix 4K if they plan to bring it out. By the time it's ready commercially, they're using H.EVC (H.265). Anything that makes 4K adoption convenient, is quite fine by me. People on fast connections (e.g. FiOS, etc) shouldn't have problems with Netflix 4K and it will help encourage deployment of fast connections, and help encourage faster adoption of 4K. Even if I prefer physical media and higher bit rates.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 1/10/13 at 1:01am

So if I have a Cray Super computer and own an internet company then 10% of Netflix movies are worth watching?

Ditto, I would rather then get the 1080p looking BD quality and the audio up to lossless and then worry about UHD. That is the only way they will get me to stop renting BDs as all the streaming 1080p is visibly compromised.

It's the other way around, actually.
Sadly, a $99 3rd-gen AppleTV is pulling in the H.264 DD5.1 streams faster (less than 5 seconds to buffer), pulling in a higher bit rate, and playing them much better than a $2000+ computer (i7 PC+16GB+SSD+5TB using Silverlight at lower bitrates).
Netflix, however, has GOT to get rid of Silverlight, though! It's holding back Netflix quality.

4K is only expensive from a display standpoint.  It takes a sub-$100 chip to decode 4K nowadays -- such chips just got announced.   Also, last year's $300 Geforce graphics card installed in my desktop computer decode 4K already on my desktop computer.   Within the next 2 years, 4K decode will become a cheap (free-ish feature built into common GPU's).  The best display technologies, however, will take longer to fall in price, but once the prices start really falling, they fall fast.  

The bigger problem is displays and Internet connections. But there are still many millions of 15Mbps+ connections in North America. Netflix says 5Mbps for their "SuperHD", but hogwash -- that too often pulls in their lower quality streams. Many ISP's are inefficient and you want a faster buffering, so put in a big fat safety margin and get at least 15Mbps (makes a big difference) and an ISP that's part of Netflix Open Connect (it's a little bit different for Canada. Both Bell and Rogers are SuperHD compatible, and it appears to work up here too once I configured my Netflix Settings on my netflix.com profile). The littlest hiccup and Internet sharing, causes stream downgrades, so using 15Mbps+ helps full lock at the maximum bitrate that Netflix offers for your device, for the entire movie, even when others use the Internet connection. It is not the low quality "3.8Mbps 1080p" that most people are seeing -- my data meter is clearly showing I've streamed a much higher bitrate that matches Netflix Super HD claims (their marketing terminology for their flagship 1080p).
Now, if you want 3D Netflix 1080p (Netflix has 12Mbps streams for their 3D movies) ignore my 15Mbps Internet recommendation and spike that to at least 25Mbps. I'm not interested in 3D Netflix, but this is the first >10Mbps Netflix streams being delivered today.

For me, even in December, they seem to have trialed/released those fat bitstreams for certain movies (and I noticed!) already before having announced "Super HD" at CES 2013. The bitrate is something resembling FibeTV/UVerse bitrates (or slightly exceeding), but with much better encodes (and no on-the-fly recompresses). Based on bitrates I'm seeing for "pleasantly tolerable" 1080p from Netflix, I'd tolerate the equivalent 4K streaming at approximately ~20Mbps, as long as it's an original encode-from-master (rather than a recompress), anything less is too artifacty/ugly. The good news is that 20Mbps+ connections already exist in major cities. By history, I think they'll overcompress 4K at first, then I'd give them a few years (like I did for Netflix 1080p; it only became tolerable/satisfactory recently), then 4K streaming becomes good after a few years of being introduced on Netflix.

I prefer Blu-Ray over the high-bitrate SuperHD streams I'm watching today from Netlfix, but my point is it's now possible to cheaply get Netflix better quality than HDTV cable or satellite. People who already have 15Mbps+ connections, live in a major city, and a good Netflix H.264 DD5.1-capable player ($99 AppleTV 3rd gen, and a few other devices like Roku) do not have much additional investment; so why not? The sound is not lossless, but it has improved to the point where it becomes an upgrade from most of the cable mess (missing DD5.1, recompress-related degradation, etc) unless you're lucky to be with a good cable provider.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 1/10/13 at 11:13am

Agree with mark. Netflix video quality has gone up recently to somewhere closer to Blu-ray than upscaled DVD quality. Looks good on PS3 and Roku xs. Now if they could get some content...

Does anyone know if the above facts hold good for only US netflix or is it also true of Canadian netflix?

Thank god someone finally spoke up. I have been streaming the 1080p Netflix on my LG ( was one of the first companies to upgrade to the 1080p player) for months now. I could never understand how everyone was saying that upscale DVD looked better than Netflix. I can't stand watching DVDs now as the picture is horrible (even on my Panasonic 310 where everyone on here raves about the upscaling). I think some members need to try streaming Netflix again on some of the newer devices that support the 1080 DD5.1 audio stream. It looks every bit as good (if not better depending on the movie) than the overly compressed signal I get from Comcast.

I would be willing to pay for Netflix streaming if I could stream say 80% of all movies. Until that happens I will stick to waiting 2 days to get the disc, which is perfectly acceptable for me and such an awesome value compared to renting from my local video store.