
Why you can't get 4K Netflix and Amazon - hugoc
http://www.macworld.com/article/2858474/why-you-cant-get-4k-netflix-and-amazon-on-a-pc-or-mac-even-though-theyre-capable.html
======
themartorana
But if I grab a torrent to the 4K version of the movie, I _can_ play it on my
computer.

Do people still legitimately wonder why so many people flock to torrents?
Hollywood (and by extension, other large content producers) have the most
sincere form of Ostrich Syndrome[0] that I know of.

[0]
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Ostrich...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Ostrich%20Syndrome)

~~~
scott_s
_Do_ people flock to torrents? No one I know does. They all watch content on
their tv, obtained through a legit streaming service or a cable subscription.

Personally, I don't feel right grabbing torrents, but I also don't want the
hassle. I think that legit digital delivery for music and video has, for the
most part, crossed the threshold where it's just easier than the alternatives.

~~~
joshstrange
> Do people flock to torrents? No one I know does.

I know quite a few people who use torrents (or usenet) as their primary source
of TV. Combining Plex + Sabnzbd + Sickbeard you get a internet DVR with little
to no maintenance once setup (other than adding more capacity as/if needed).
They all have a hulu-like (next day) experience, they get it in HD, and there
are no ads.

Legit delivery for music has crossed the threshold but video has not. You
still have to use multiple services to watch everything you want.

~~~
redblacktree
The setup you're describing is beyond the reach of a great many people. They
pay for Netflix instead.

~~~
anigbrowl
I can't be bothered to go through it, and I do film post & production for a
living, so it's not any lack of technical capability.

~~~
m3mnoch
agreed. torrenting is not worth my time.

1) at this point, i just want it to work. if i don't _have_ to do it, don't
enjoy doing it, or don't get paid for doing it, i don't want to waste any time
on it. time spent in setup and maintenance of torrent/media servers in the
past has permanently put me on the netflix/hulu/amazon/spotify/roku side of
the cost-to-benefit equation. i'm even one of those weird people who pay for
netflix dvds.

2) there's so much content out there, that if your content is NOT available in
the ecosystem, sorry, but my family doesn't bother to consume it. it's an
attention economy and your (mr. content producer!) content strategy is putting
you below the poverty line.

------
meesterdude
I tried to rent an HD movie (the family man (hey, its the holidays)) on amazon
but was told my device (27-inch imac) is not "compatible". Super WTF. A
torrented version gives me none of that BS. And its free.

Piracy is mostly a matter of market. The more DRM BS you try to force upon me,
the more I'm going to do to not give you any of my money at all.

Even if most people pay for content, any level of piracy is "unacceptable" to
these companies. It's not enough that they make a buck, or make quite a few.
They have to crap all over the experience in an attempt to stop piracy, which
is a fools errand and hurts the people who DO pay for content.

I'll start being reasonable when they stop being unreasonable.

~~~
jotm
Haha, yes, Amazon, where they offer digital copies of movies that can only be
downloaded when your physical copy arrives in the mail. Fooking ridiculous.

~~~
tedunangst
? All the times I've done that, Amazon sends me a disc in the mail and then
gives me an immediate 48 hour rental. I don't wait for the disc. Unless you're
talking about the "UltraViolet" or "Digital Copy" thing, but that's not
Aamzon. That's the studio. You get the same thing in a store.

Amazon even has a whole page that explains the difference.
[http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Copy-
DVD/b?ie=UTF8&node=721726...](http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Copy-
DVD/b?ie=UTF8&node=721726011)

~~~
jotm
Yes, the Digital Copy - I was very confused about it.

------
TodPunk
I worked for a company that had a media encoding lab approved by 5 of the
major Hollywood studios, and I can assure you, this is purely studios not
approving PCs and not allowing Amazon or Netflix to talk about it. Good lord
do studios hate technology if they don't feel they control it completely. I
invented two studio approved DRM schemes for embedded devices and you can be
quite a bit simpler with DRM if you control the whole thing. If you want to
cover PCs, you have to use more extensive DRM, usually 'off-the-shelf' as we
call it, and you don't get more attractive content for that market. For
instance, in airlines, you can get pre-DVD release movies for approved
systems, but you can't for personal devices (even mobile devices).

To the people talking about torrenting it instead, that's again the entire
point. It limits access to those able to torrent, but still enables studios to
control a significant part of the market that can't or won't torrent. It
really is all a control game.

------
johnduhart
> Anyone who knows technology knows the computational and image-processing
> capabilities of even an average PC or Mac far outstrip those of a streaming
> box, set-top box, or smart TV by several orders of magnitude.

It's quite possible these TVs or STBs are shipping with a special hardware
decoder that supports this format that they're using.

~~~
Pyrodogg
It's actually quite interesting to me that many 2014 AV receivers support HDMI
2.0 (Fully capable of 4K video pass through) but DO NOT have HDCP 2.2
implemented.

They are technologically fully capable of providing the desired service (4K
video) to the customer but as soon as HDCP 2.2 Blu-ray players and 4K content
come out they are fully obsoleted.

"As of this update, among the major manufacturers of AV receivers only
Onkyo/Integra offers such AV Receivers that support both HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2
as will be needed to support certain of the high quality 4K/UHD video sources,
such as the upcoming Blu-ray 4K/UHD players." [1]

1 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Blu-
ray_Disc_and_HD_DVD_pl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Blu-
ray_Disc_and_HD_DVD_players)

~~~
smacktoward
_> They are technologically fully capable of providing the desired service (4K
video) to the customer but as soon as HDCP 2.2 Blu-ray players and 4K content
come out they are fully obsoleted_

You're assuming that's a bug. It means that users will have to buy a new box
to access all that content, which means the manufacturers may see it instead
as a _feature._

------
imgabe
> I and your readers on a PC or Mac could intercept the 4K [content] and
> therefore transmit it to a country that doesn’t have the rights.

Wow, maybe if there's a country full of people so eager to watch your content
that they'll steal it you should, I don't know, sell them the rights to watch
it? Of course, I'm just a simple nobody. I guess you have to be a fancy movie
studio executive to understand how you make more money by preventing people
from accessing your content.

~~~
mmastrac
The studios and middlemen that bring content to people's doorsteps have
created this incredible Gordian knot of contractual obligations and
agreements. This industry showed up in the dark ages of connectivity where
content was produced for a local market.

If someone else wanted to show this content in their jurisdiction, they'd just
create a one-off agreement for it and be on their way. They honestly don't
know how to sell to the entire world at the same time.

Piracy is the Alexandrian solution to this. Untying the relationships and
legal contracts would take decades, but the threat of piracy forces them to
offer solutions today to compete.

~~~
imgabe
I'm sure there's contracts and such, but really, what leverage does Zoltar's
Romanian Film Distribution Inc. have over Sony or Disney? They can't just say,
"Look, we really don't need you to drive truckloads of DVDs around the country
anymore. It's been nice working with you, good luck."

Obviously they still need translations and such, but can't that be done
concurrently while they're preparing for release anyway?

------
timboslice
TL;DR - speculation it's due to DRM/pirating concerns. Most TV's have no
output and are therefore a safe mechanism to allow playback, whereas a PC
could rip the stream

------
cwyers
I have a hard time getting too worked up over this in the case of Amazon,
because I have a heck of a time getting them to stream even SD content without
horrible buffering issues.

~~~
random28345
That's why I pay for Prime (and Netflix, et. al.), and torrent the content.

Admittedly, I feel a little bad about paying providers of DRMed content, it
sends the wrong market signal. But if I didn't pay these content providers, I
wouldn't have a mechanism of signalling that I enjoy watching certain TV shows
and movies.

~~~
balls187
If you cancel your subscriptions will you delete your torrented content?

What if content is removed from Netflix?

~~~
redblacktree
I get what you're saying, but this is the edge case. I applaud GP for doing
the right thing in the 95% case.

~~~
balls187
It's not really an edge case, is it?

Does a netflix subscription give you rights to torrent movies that exist on
Netflix?

If so, what happens when they no longer exist.

Does the parent commenter check Netflix first before downloading a torrent?

I'm not passing judgement, but merely pointing out that a netflix subscription
doesn't grant you the license to download and store content, in fact, it's
likely expressly forbidden in the TOS.

ETA:

Not to sound self righteous, I torrented a copy of TES4: Oblivion for the PC
day-1, after buying it from Amazon. It was being shipped, but I wanted to play
it immediately.

~~~
MacsHeadroom
>Does a netflix subscription give you rights to torrent movies that exist on
Netflix?

When did anything remove my right to copy data freely anyway? Copyright is an
illegitimate joke.

~~~
balls187
That's an ignorant view of copyright.

I'm a photographer, and I prefer to keep control of my work. I'm glad
copyright laws exist to prevent others from using my art without properly
gaining consent.

Sure you can feel like you can copy my photos, but then others should be able
to copy your source code. After all, it's just data.

~~~
MacsHeadroom
> but then others should be able to copy your source code.

As a FOSS activist and kopimist, that is exactly what I believe.

------
logicallee
A commenter, richcon, on the linked story makes a good point:

" The open source HEVC software decoder requires a four-core Intel Core i7
running at 2.3 Ghz to play 30p 4k video, and I'd guess it'd be running so hot
you could fry an egg on it. The Retina iMac only has an i7 chip in the maxed-
out upgrade configuration. So maybe it is about the hardware performance.

If Amazon paid for it they could license a commercial software decoder with
lower CPU requirements, but that'd cost them a lot of money and still likely
run with fans blazing.

Those new embedded TV chips you deem to be weak compared to desktop CPUs have
dedicated hardware designed specifically for decoding this new video format,
and dedicated chips beat software performance any day. When most desktop PCs
ship with hardware 4k HEVC decoders too, then I'd expect Amazon and Netflix to
come on board."

 _(I think he would be fine with my copying it with the same attribution he
posted with - it 's just a story comment.)_

~~~
nharada
Yeah, reading this article my first thought was that it probably wasn't
entirely malevolence. Not that I agree with the way video content providers
run their businesses, but I suspect that running 4K video in the browser would
chug the average user's machine. My 3 year old laptop works pretty hard just
to display HD.

If I was Netflix I wouldn't want to release 4K if it meant only a small
segment of customers would get a good experience. Releasing a disclaimer that
the user requires adequate hardware won't satisfy the majority of computer
users who don't know or care about the specs required. Most people just want
it to work.

I also take issue with the line, "Anyone who knows technology knows the
computational and image-processing capabilities of even an average PC or Mac
far outstrip those of a streaming box." Dedicated hardware can outperform a
general computer while requiring less "processing power" (measured in FLOPS or
GHz or whatever). The Chromecast has a dual-core CPU and 512 MB of RAM and it
runs HD video perfectly.

------
douglas_k
DRM was sold to the politicians and public alike as a means of getting great
content to customers and preventing piracy.

I suspect it won't be long before the DRM being used for the Amazon and
Netflix 4K TV streams are well and truly broken like they were for HDMI and
other "secure" measures before it.

------
meesterdude
I wish I could just pay these companies for the right to download whatever I
wanted. Bittorrent solves the storage and transmission issue for them and lets
me download movies from the 1980's that nobody (apple, amazon, netflix) have
in their inventory.

Movies and music are more than simply products, they are part of our culture.
Nobody would argue that they shouldn't make money from it, because we want
them to succeed and do it again. But what we don't like is getting fucked
over, and thats basically their business.

There was some disney show a friend of mine wanted to watch with his kids,
which was classically available via amazon prime. But then it became the
holidays, and disney pulled it from prime so now he had to pay to watch it.
It's the same song and dance with netflix, who is at the mercy of the
licensing of media companies who decide how much to charge for the license,
and if they want to license it at all to them.

It's an exploration of bullshit and greed.

------
k-mcgrady
I wonder if part of the reason is lack of demand too. What percentage of
Netflix subscribers actually have 4K monitors + the bandwidth needed to stream
something of that quality?

------
balls187
Which devices support Netflix and Amazon 4k streams?

ETA:

From Netflix' FAQ it looks like it's via the TV apps on select "Smart" TV's.

[https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444)

------
ollifi
How much is there 4k content currently? Arri Alexa which is quite common
production camera shoots something like 2880x1620. Red has more pixels via
heavier compression but even that stuff seems to be mastered 2k which is the
common cinema format. Or maybe it is regional, but I don't think we have 4k
cinemas anywhere here. I would hope they would spend the bandwith to get
netflix stream closer to cinema datarates rather than try to compress more
pixels through thin pipe.

------
fnordfnordfnord
tl;dr In order to get the content in the first place, we had to sign contract
that said we wouldn't distribute it to a PC, and that we wouldn't tell anyone
the real reason.

Why Netflix or Amazon would tolerate that is another question. I'm not
convinced they need to.

But, I'm not the right one to ask anyway because I can't get that kind of
internet access from my cable company, and therefore not going to watch any 4k
anything for a few years, I'd bet.

------
ep103
Amazon's video streaming quality can be horrendous. Checking that I'm using an
HDMI cable before streaming me HD content? Really?

------
_RPM
As a torrent user, I do find that paid content is higher quality and more
convenient, unless you have a dedicated setup. It is so simple to turn my TV
on and watch a move than it is to connect my laptop, download the torrent,
which involves firing up my VM, finding the torrent magnet link, and then
DL'ing it.

~~~
slayed0
Not all torrents are created equal. There are certain (private) communities
within the torrent world which have amazing release groups who are dedicated
to producing the highest quality versions possible.

There are also groups who focus purely on release time and quality is at most
a secondary concern. What I'm getting at is that using torrents (or rather
piracy) allows to obtain content that matches your needs (in this case quality
vs release time). You can get music/movies/tv shows etc in higher quality than
any commercially available streaming source allows for.

------
ademarre
Reminds me of this: [http://avc.com/2012/01/scarcity-is-a-shitty-business-
model/](http://avc.com/2012/01/scarcity-is-a-shitty-business-model/)

------
aosmith
Because everyone's comcast would choke and die?

~~~
keeganpoppen
it's ok-- amazon is a level3 customer and comcast refuses to upgrade the
interconnect between their two networks* (even if level3 foots the bill), so
it would choke no worse than it's already choking.

* technically level3 doesn't name them by name, but i wouldn't really consider it reading between the lines...

~~~
NoPiece
Amazon is a level 3 customer, but Amazon also has a direct connect with
Comcast.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/see-
wh...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/see-which-isps-
google-microsoft-and-netflix-trade-internet-traffic-with/)

------
zackify
Do they not understand you can just get a PVR and record the movie on a tv....

~~~
lttlrck
On which 4K cable service would that be?

