People are mostly concerned about content rather than picture quality. Netflix can deliver 720p and people will pay for it, some people will pay for 4K because of the marketing but don't actually notice that they're getting 720p, and only a small group of people left over actually care enough.

Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.

Oh, are you suggesting that they're just straight up lying? They would need to not just trick me into thinking I'm seeing HDR (which is probably doable), but also trick my TV into thinking it's playing Dolby Vision, and also actually use significantly more bandwidth than a 720p stream would (I've checked at my router).

I'm sure all those things are possible, but it's also pretty likely that they're actually producing and distributing content in 4K and Dolby Vision.

I think you may be responding to something that I didn't write, because I absolutely never suggested that NetFlix is lying or tricking you.

It's just a matter of fact that, for various (many) reasons, people will get 720p streams. Some of these people are paying $3/month for "Premium" with "Ultra HD" and simply do not notice that they are not getting 4K streams. NetFlix would probably rather keep the $3/month, the alternative would be to educate their users about why they are are not getting 4K (can your TV handle it? can your playback device handle it? are they connected correctly? are they configured correctly? do you have sufficient bandwidth? are there problems with your ISP? does your device have the right DRM?) and this is both time-consuming and likely to create a bit of a support nightmare.

Sorry, I misinterpreted. I was thinking from the perspective of people with working 4K setups who are seeking 4K content.

Yeah, I can't see a way to fake Dolby Vision - it's pretty obvious when you're getting the extra dynamic range from the image - I'm surprised by how much more apparent it is than 4k. I can see resolution fakery, but that's why I asked if they thought it was possible to scale down the 4k Dolby Vision to 1080p Dolby Vision

I mean, you can definitely fake Dolby Vision. The Apple TV 4K has an option to always output Dolby Vision, and they do their own tone mapping to output normal HDR or SDR content in Dolby Vision. I don't use this feature, and it had pretty terrible reviews at launch (although I heard they have improved it).

But yeah, I think the actual presence of additional dynamic range is pretty noticeable for most well-produced content.

Netflix could fake Dolby Vision by dumping MORE data in than was in the original stream - that seems like a wasteful way to cut corners.

I understand that. I was just wondering if the 4k streams (the ones that say 4k|Dolby Vision) are being converted down. I'd guess no.