Click to Skip Ad
Closing in...

Netflix is already looking beyond 4K

Published Feb 2nd, 2016 11:15PM EST
Netflix 4K HDR TV

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

Years after they made their debut, 4K televisions are finally affordable. It was only a matter of time, but the average viewer is only now beginning to upgrade to the latest standard in display technology. But despite all the hype that 4K resolution has received, Netflix is confident that another technology will be the real difference maker this generation.

READ MORE: New on Netflix: Every movie and TV show being added in February 2016

In an interview with Digital Trends, Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, said that the company sees High Dynamic Range as “the next big thing in TV.”

“I think HDR is more visibly different than 4K,” said Hunt. “Over the past 15 years, we have had plenty of increments of pixels on the screen, and from what we saw with digital cameras, pixel count eventually stopped being interesting.” To the untrained eye (or even a well-trained eye), 25 megapixels vs. 20 megapixels becomes indecipherable.

“In the real world, you have 14 bits of brightness difference, so imagine stepping outside to look at a reflection of water or shadow of a tree that’s between 12 and 14-bits of range,” Hunt continued. “TV only represents 8 bits, so you lose one or the other; you can’t have the brights and the darks at the same time.”

That’s the key to creating an image that the viewer has never seen before — light and colors, rather than more pixels. Netflix is going to put a great deal of effort into bringing HDR content to the market this year, even if it takes some time for the TV manufacturers and the consumers to catch up.

“The big step for Netflix this year is that we’re shooting our original shows with cameras that are capable of capturing all the range, then mastering for HDR,” Hunt said. “That includes all the metadata for both types of TVs because we worked with the manufacturers to render it properly. We’re ready to start building a library and the TVs are making a big leap this year.”

Be sure to read the full interview at Digital Trends.

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.