From what distance do you view your 40" 4K Samsung TV?
Adoption Of 4K Streaming Will Be Stalled By Bandwidth, Not Hardware & Devices http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2015/01/4k-streaming-bandwidth-problem.html
"With all the talk of 4K that took place at CES, some within the industry are making statements and assumptions about 4K streaming bitrates that simply aren’t accurate. Many are under the impression that 4K streaming will soon be delivered at around 10-12Mbps using HEVC and are also quoting data from Akamai incorrectly. If you look at the HEVC testing that guys like
Jan Ozer and
Alex Zambelli have done, and look at the
data Netflix has presented around their 4K encoding (Netflix’s current bitrate for 4K is 15.6Mbps), the bitrates won’t get down to 10-12Mbps anytime soon.
The reality is that true 4K streaming can’t take place at even 12-15Mbps unless there is a 40% efficiency in encoding going from H.264 to HEVC and the content is 24/30 fps, not 60 fps. Netflix has stated they expect HEVC to provide a 20-30% encoding efficiency vs H.264, within two years. That’s a long way away from the 40% required to get bitrates down to 12-15Mbps. While 4K can in theory be compressed at 10-12Mbps, this is typically achieved by reducing the frame rate or sacrificing quality. As Encoding.com points out, to date, “
most of the HEVC we’ve seen in the market is heavily noise-reduced with high frequency details blurred out to fake the 40% efficiency”. The optimal bandwidth for high quality 4K is higher than 20Mbps.
With Netflix already encoding 4K content at 15.6Mbps today, and with the expertise they have in encoding and the money they spend on bandwidth, they will get the bitrate lower over time. Some observers think it might go down to 10-12Mbps, but that would only be possible down the road and at 24/30 fps, not 60 fps. If you want 60 fps, it’s going to be even higher. But even if we use the 10-12Mbps number, no ISP can sustain it, at scale.
So while everyone wants to talk about compression rates, and bitrates, no one is talking about what the last mile can support or how content owners are going to pay to deliver all the additional bits. The bottom line is that for the next few years at least, 4K streaming will be near impossible to deliver at scale, even at 10-12Mbps, via the cloud with guaranteed QoS."