John Batter, CEO of M-Go, the transactional VOD content service backed by DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, had every reason to smile at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Standing in front of a 4K TV at the sprawling Samsung booth, Batter showed off an upgraded, more user-friendly interface for M-Go, which had just announced a new 4K streaming service exclusively through Samsung.
“We think it’s really visually [unique],” he said of the 4K service, which will offer a combination of native 4K and up-scaled 4K movies, from Fox, Paramount and other studios. “Our plan is to build it up aggressively. We’ve got discussions going on with everyone right now.” He went on to mention that content that’s merely optimized for 4K — which denotes a video resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, or four times that of current high-def — would only require a 3 Mbps Internet connection, an easy entryway for early consumers of 4K technology.
However, for native 4K, a 15 Mbps connection would be required for streaming purposes, Batter mentioned. And that portends a major problem for 4K overall, according to Dan Rayburn, principal analyst with consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, and EVP of StreamingMedia.com.
Despite all the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compression solutions for 4K offered by numerous companies, despite the hardware push for 4K two years running now at CES, and despite the numerous 4K services announced at the 2014 CES — from Netflix, Amazon, Comcast and more — the content delivery model doesn’t make fiscal sense, in Rayburn’s estimation. “Netflix and Amazon are only [Keep reading…]
Source: Mesalliance.org
How ironic! After blasting 3D and touting 4K, Netflix realizes it isn’t reasonable to stream 4K with existing plans and infrastructure! It looks like they were wrong on both counts! Being an industry leader doesn’t make them an authority on technology. Netflix has had a number of high-publicized snafu’s!