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Netflix: We'll Have 4K Video In Year or Two
By Swanni Follow @SwanniOnTV
Washington, D.C. (March 15, 2013) -
Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt tells TheVerge.com that
his company hopes to deliver 4K streaming in the next year or
two and that streaming will be the "best way" to get 4K into the
home.
Hunt was responding to a question suggesting that studios
and TV manufacturers will attempt to throttle Netflix's growth
by pushing 4K video, which will require an enormous amount of
bandwidth to deliver and could tax a user's Internet usage cap.
But Hunt noted that Netflix's new original drama, House of
Cards, was shot in 4K and that the company has been preparing
for a switch to the new format, which purports to offer a
resolution four times greater than today's 1080p sets.
"Clearly we much work to do with the compression and decoded
capability (for 4K), but we expect to be delivering 4K within a
year or two with at least some movies and then over time become
an important source of 4K. 4K will likely be streamed first
before it does anywhere else," Hunt said.
He added: "Our own original House of Cards was shot in 4K. It's
being mastered in full HD, but the raw footage, or a good chunk
of it, was shot in 4K, and we hope to have some House of Cards
4K encodes later this year."
