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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

I've spent a long time wondering the same thing. The standard answer is that it's fallout from the anti-anti-piracy cat and mouse game. The more conspiratorial answer is that bandwidth is expensive and streaming sites will take any excuse to serve you a lower resolution than what you actually paid for, while still being able to say that they technically support 4K.

There are sensible-ish technical reasons why they can't deliver DRM'd 4K on linux, but when browser extensions can upgrade you to 4K there are no excuses on the technical level.

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The point is, people usually pay because it is more convenient for them than getting it illegally.

But when I have to fiddle around for 30 Minutes to see a picture (it worked before until it suddenly didn't work anymore), pirating the movie is suddenly the better option. Because I certainly don't see a point in paying and wasting more of my time.

And the piracy cat and mouse game is stupid, as in the End it's always Available illegaly, except for the people developing and selling DRM

Netflix does charge more for 4k, so they simply pass along the cost: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

Netflix still saves money when someone watches in a lower resolution.

Yes, but what they care about is profits. People aren't going to pay for the expensive plan if they can't actually use the features of it.

Most people who aren't getting proper 4K don't even notice.

Bingo. I mostly have watched Netflix for the last decade and recently tried Apple TV. It looks so much crisper. I didn't realize what I was missing.

There's a fine line, reduce quality too far and customer satisfaction drops. Some customers will have a higher tolerance to dropping quality than others, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.

So you do studies, you look at the impact of quality changes to customer churn and then you move the line appropriately.

Marketing emphasizing 4K helps reduce this.

We need to divorce "corporate" from "tech"

Never going to happen. Tech came from corporate.

Bandwidth is only expensive if you're getting it from Amazon or Google. Cloudflare gives it away for free.

Netflix is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic. That's expensive no matter how you slice it, and dropping that by a mere 1% is a huge saving.

Hm, true. Then again, I don't know if that's worth the reputational hit. These subscribers are paying for 4K.

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