A dirty little secret of the TV industry is that you don’t need that 4K TV unless you have a TV literally the size of your wall. But that doesn’t stop people from being impressed with numbers, and, hey, quite a few people really do have a giant TV, or even several giant TVs. And for those people, Netflix is looking to offer an “ultra” plan at a higher price.
Variety reports Netflix is testing a plan that lets you either get four Ultra HD streams, currently what you get for the $13.99 Premium plan, which would be knocked down to two UHD streams, or a plan that allows only Ultra members access to high dynamic range, or HDR, content, which more accurately reproduces colors and offers sharper contrast. Of course, a cynic would point out that HDR is not an actual standard, but largely just a marketing term, when it comes to televisions, but it’s not their money. And you’d be paying a relatively beefy $16.99 a month to watch Kimmy, Eleven, and the rest.
This is currently only a test, and Netflix might decide not to bother with it as a consumer product. And even at nearly twenty bucks, that’s still a lot cheaper for most of us than cable, which is part of the reason many are ditching cable for Netflix anyway. But it does illustrate that there’s more to the streaming wars than just content; all the many, many services hoping to dethrone Big Red will have to think about the technological aspect as well.
(via Variety)
