What in the Ultra HD World?

Recently, Claus Bülow Christensen, the producer of the Copenhagen Future of TV Conference, interviewed Reed Hastings, the CEO and Founder of Netflix, who touched on a wide range of topics from Nordic programming to the evolution of broadcast television.

With Netflix acting as a major disruptor of the status quo, Hastings has a front row seat to the tectonic shifts occurring in content distribution and his thoughts on the future are worth noting.

But one subject in particular caught my attention, Hastings confirmed that Netflix was planning on streaming Ultra HD content in 2014.

That piece of information has been floating around for a while. His follow-up with details on bandwidth was enlightening. He figured that an Ultra HD stream would be "around 15 megabits per second."

Though his next statement caught me a bit off guard. Hastings said, "It's not too bad. If you've got a 60-megabit connection you'll be fine."

I'm just upgrading to a 30-megabit plan and I reckoned that would put me squarely ahead of the bandwidth curve. It seems that I am mistaken. Luckily, Goggle Fiber's Gigabit service is coming to Austin next year.

Of course, Ultra HD streams will only play on Ultra HD TVs, which Hastings predicts will come down in costs over the next few years. He thinks that people might buy a 4K tablet or laptop first and he says, "eventually, there will be no premium, no extra cost for a 4K television... (they) won't be any different than the current televisions today."

Therefore, he sees a slow build-up in demand for Ultra HD streams, which should not overtax the Internet service providers.

You can watch the whole interview below. Hastings comments on 4K start at about 23:00.

The playing field keeps on morphing. Stay tuned.

As an update, in early November 2013, Netflix posted "El Fuente" an eight minute short about Mexico City. As a test, Netflix is streaming it in 4K Ultra HD resolution. Of course you will need an Ultra HD TV to reap the full benefit of the 4K clip.