For me, it's the reverse. Netflix is really good at tailoring the feed to your bandwidth. I hate watching Hulu when I'm on the road because crappy motel wifi will destroy Hulu, and even Amazon is... weak. Netflix is like "Oh hey, you're not home anymore, are you? Let's just keep lowering the quality until there's no choppiness. Sorry everything's blurred, but that's the best I can do in Waynesboro."

My fiancees parents live out in a tiny country town with an awful phone line an internet connection. They can't really make landline calls, they frequently can't load a lot of websites, youtube is usually right out, but somehow they can always watch Netflix.

IIRC Netflix has preferred traffic agreements with a number of backbones and ISPs -- so it's Netflix that's actually killing everything else lol.

What is HDR in this context exactly? I thought it was these saturated images but that makes no sense.

Those saturated images you're thinking of started as HDR but to display them on a non-HDR monitor they had to be converted first. The conversion process uses various tricks like local contrast to make it seem they're still HDR.

This can look quite natural when done right. But some people like to crank the settings in the converter to make the images super saturated.

HDR is high dynamic range. Basically, TVs that support HDR can show more unique brightness levels between the darkest and the brightest. That means you can have more contrast in an image.

I haven't seen an HDR TV in person, but I've heard people say that it's a more significant upgrade than the resolution jump from 1080p to 4k.

I have an OLED 4k from last year. It was a massive improvement over my first generation Samsung 4k tv. It's insane how dark blacks can get and likewise how bright the lights are right next to darks. Most people are used to black being a shade of gray. That's starting to be a thing of the past now.

HDR in monitors means (a) very high white point (800 to 1000 nits) and a very low black point. It lets you see more detail in the highs and lows. Its kind of replaced 3d as the new buzzword to sell super high-end monitors.

Speaking as someone who knows pixels, HDR is the first non buzz thing that's been out for a long time. Try it before making quick judgements

It's great, or I would say if I could see it without shelling out $100 for some hardware that would have literally no other purpose than 4k Netflix. Not to mention, HDR is disabled in the drivers for any consumer video card. I would really enjoy the content, but I refuse to spend my hard-earned cash jumping through arbitrary hoops just because of proprietary software and DRM. Am I really asking for too much here?

In terms of hardware, sony has built in 4k and hdr streaming through its androidtv software. I hardwire from its ethernet port.

Yet I can't even get 1080p in Chrome or Firefox.