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>4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s.

Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge a premium for it!)

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I doubt it. All streaming services are around this bitrate or a little higher, like around 30 Mb/s or so. This bitrate is good enough for most people and is likely to remain so. People watch on their 50" bargain TVs with a soundbar, or even just on a laptop/tablet. Most people wouldn't even be able to tell a difference. It's just not worth the cost of the almost 10x bandwidth for Netflix to stream losslessly encoded video and sound that like 95% of customers won't even notice.

You also can't always just 100% directly compare bitrates because Netflix can more easily adopt efficient new codecs while e.g. for 1080p Blu Rays a lot of them are still VC-1.

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