I think you'd be surprised.

From my perspective a large proportion of people in the UK have at least one 4K TV, (unfortunately) most of which are 'smart'. Carrying apps for Netflix, Prime, BBC etc.

Add to that that the majority of houses contain a current generation games console. From my perspective 4k in the UK has permeated most age groups and economic groups.

It is easy enough for most households to obtain speeds that can support 4K in the UK. The UK (as well as most of Europe I think) don't have data caps, means there is very little concern about streaming 4K.

I think the BBC did a really good job in the earlier days of 4K in releasing fantastic sports (Olympics & Football) and nature documentaries with David Attenborough.

However, I appreciate that this is a small section of the overall Netflix user-base and based on my somewhat bias viewpoint. I'm sure there are subsets of the UK that would disagree.

>From my perspective a large proportion of people in the UK have at least one 4K TV, (unfortunately) most of which are 'smart'. Carrying apps for Netflix, Prime, BBC etc.

Having a 4K TV with Netflix won't give you 4K Netflix. You need to actually pay extra for it, about a third more.

It also gives you 4 simultaneous users with the premium plan, which I would guess most families use simply based on that.

If they’re sharing logins, maybe. I bet most families that manage to stream four things at once almost never try to do so on a single service at the same time. Can’t you still get Disney+ for about the price of upgrading to 4K Netflix? Or some-ads Hulu.

Of course, that's the point of the account to share logins, you still get your own user with your own lists, recommendations and all that. Though, Spotify handles it nicer where you can add your own account to the family group plan.

Not often, but often enough to become a nuisance with 2 TVs or so, some tablet/laptop for school work/gaming/whatever and a mobile device per person.

Yeah, I think that's about right.

>a large proportion of people in the UK have at least one 4K TV

I don't own a 4k tv, so I was interested in the actual numbers:

"ownership of ultra-high definition (‘4K’) televisions has more than doubled in the past two years, from 17% in 2017 to 35% this year"

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-new...

Article from Nov 2019

I had a hard time digging up any numbers on this. As far as I can tell, Netflix doesn't seem to offer a breakdown of their subscribers. In 2018, Parks Associates (a market research and consulting company) estimated that 30% of Netflix subscribers were on the "Premium" tier [1], which is the only tier that offers 4K. That percentage may have gone up (with increased prevalence of 4K media and viewing devices) or down (with rising prices) since then, but 30% certainly represents a respectable fraction of Netflix's subscriber base.

[1] https://www.parksassociates.com/blog/article/fov2018-pr23

>30% of Netflix subscribers were on the "Premium" tier [1], which is the only tier that offers 4K.

Here the best tier is actually called the "Family" tier. Seems to suggest that the real value proposition for the 33% price increase is not 4K over 1080p, but rather being able to watch four streams at a time instead of two.

Every medium to high end TV in best buyw as 4K in 2016. By 2017 it was hard to find 1080p TVs at best buy. Today I'm fairly certain my local one doesn't have any. Why are seemingly tech-enthusiast forums and subreddits more often than not resolution luddites? It's not just here, I've seen this in a lot of tech-related internet places and the trend baffles me.

That isn't the point the OP is trying to make; they're saying, correctly, that Netflix limits the resolution to 720p/1080p in browsers like Firefox.

It's not just 4K, it's Dolby Vision as well with the extended brightness and color gamut. Well worth the money, Netflix is by far the best looking service you can get on your television.

I watch it on my 65" 4k TV.

Seems to work pretty well.

(That's apparently the average size of new TVs https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/22/giant-70-inch-tv... )

Everyone who uses it on the app on their 4k TV.

Not all of them. You have to pay more money (currently $16 / month [1]), have sufficiently fast internet, and watch content that is actually available in 4K.

[1] https://www.netflix.com/signup/planform

Your internet doesn’t even need to be terribly fast. 25Mbps should do it:

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

I think most households are on that plan anyway in order to get more than two streams.

720 or 1080 is enough for me on my 2011 plasma TV, in fact I think it is perfect. I find the 4K image on modern LED screens (or whatever they are called nowadays) pretty cold, non-movie like.

That doesn't make any sense. Color accuracy has nothing to do with resolution.

That might very well be the case, but I can certainly see the difference between how a plasma TV displays colors (more movie-like) and the way LED screens do (less movie-like, a lot more difficult to suspend disbelief while watching it).

One of my close friends has one of these 4K TVs and watching "Friends" (the TV show) at his home was quite eerie, it felt like all the characters were part of our room, and not in a good way. Color- and resolution- imperfections make a movie, well, more movie-like, at least for us people who got to see movies displayed on screens not very much unlike what you could see in "Cinema Paradiso" [1]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095765/

I think you're noticing the "soap opera effect" which is caused by increasing the frame rate with motion interpolation. You can normally find a way to turn it off.

https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/soap-opera-effect-m...

I've been told that more than once, but I don't think that avoids the "perfect colours" effect.

People in here seem not to understand that some of the colours not displaying perfectly or a colour "merging" into its neighbouring screen colour is a feature, not a bug. I do not want to see all the pixels and all the colours on the screen as they are, it's as simple as that.

Your 2011 plasma is far from color-perfect. It wasn't when it was new, and it's likely degraded in 9 years.

Whatever the actual reason, my wife re-bought the DVD set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy after switching to the Blu Ray version, citing basically the same reason, and that was just DVD-resolution to 1080p. And she still goes to see them in the theater every so often when they show and thinks they look fine there. Go figure. Maybe some companies are messing with color grading and such in higher res versions, or otherwise applying some sort of filters? Like how The Matrix was made much greener after the first theatrical and first DVD release.

Mark your calendar for June 25th when the ultra 4K release comes out.

My guess is that the blu-ray release was just an early one that happened to be a poorly done transfer.

Googling around, it looks like only the extended-edition fellowship blu ray had some fairly severe color issues (much greener than every other release). That might have been part of what she picked up on.

The upgrade path from your plasma is an OLED TV, probably from LG.

And honestly it doesn’t sound like you’ve actually seen modern, not-cheap-Walmart expensive televisions these days. The color quality is incredible.

I’m not saying to run out and waste money on electronics, but there’s absolutely no way a 2011 plasma looks as good as a 4K OLED with all the modern processing technologies.

> The color quality is incredible.

I've mentioned it above, those perfect colours make a movie less movie-like for me, because said perfectness makes me harder to suspend disbelief while watching said movies, which are displayed with perfect colors. I don't dispute that today's screens display colors in a more truthful way compared to my 2011 plasma, but that doesn't help with movie watching.

This is a very old discussion among movie buffs, that's why a few movie directors that can afford if artistically and money-wise still insist on filming on 35mm (even though today's digital recording devices are a lot more closer to "reality" compared to 35mm film). It's not only because of "hipsterism" or whatever one might think to call it.

People who primarily use browsers to access Netflix will be a single digit percentage of the user base.

Firefox users will be substantially less than 1%.

This is 100% correct. Netflix is watched primarily on apps on ARM based devices like streaming boxes and smart TVs.

The tech enthusiasts that still think that Bob in accounting should use IRC instead of Slack don’t like that reality but it’s the truth.

Lots of people watch Netflix on their computers…

This is from 2018: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10381281/S...

I would guess computer is below 5% now. Firefox below 1% is probably correct.