Netflix has begun to stream 4K Video to its customers

Today Netflix announced that it has began streaming its first pieces of 4K content to customers with 2014 model 4K TVs that support the H.265/HEVC decoder. House of Cards gets the title of the first TV series to get streamed in 4K, and a couple of nature documentaries are also being offered in 4K. Unfortunately, those who have 4K televisions that were manufactured or bought in 2013 will not be able to enjoy these offerings from Netflix due to codec incompatibilities.

Website HDTVTest is reporting that the 4K streams coming from Netflix are being delivered at 15.6Mbp/s and show obvious signs of compression, but does look better than Netflix's previous high-quality offering of the so-called "SuperHD" format. Unfortunately there are just not enough 4K TVs out there at the moment for widespread testing results to call back to, but I feel that Netflix will have a long journey ahead before any full-quality 4K content is passed on to customers.