 4K TVs have been news for a while now, but the big question is content. How can you watch anything? Enter Netflix. This year at CES, the company announced a number of partnerships that will make 4K streaming in your home a reality. We sat down with Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt to talk about how they got there and what's coming next. I'm here with Neil Hunt from Netflix. Neil, thanks for sitting down with us today. So you guys have had a very, very busy CES today about 4K streaming. It's one of the biggest stories at a CES this year. Tell us a little bit about how you guys got to this place. There's a lot of manufacturing and hardware partners lined up. What's the story behind it? How did you get here today? We really wanted to continue to push the envelope in terms of delivering the highest quality picture possible. So in the last few years, we've moved to deliver high definition HD. We recently started doing super high def, which is a high bit rate, high definition, still 1080p. And the next logical step was to embrace the 4K sets that TV manufacturers are building. Cool. So you mentioned the TVs that are coming out lately. It's an interesting dynamic that's been going on because the last year and a half, the TV industry has been 4K is the thing. This is great. And everybody goes like, okay, cool. What can we watch? Do you feel like those manufacturers are relying on you guys to a certain degree? One of the interesting pieces, of course, is that 4K is not going to have a major lifetime on a plastic desk. It doesn't fit on a Blu-ray desk. And I think it's unlikely that people will want to upgrade their DVD players. Similarly, it's unlikely that it will be embraced rapidly on the broadcast and cable side. And so internet delivery is where it's at. And we want to be amongst the very first to deliver really good ultra high def 4K picture across the internet. That means doing things like embracing HEVC H.265 encoders, figuring out how to use those and encode properly. But then even more important, we have to go back and get content. And today everybody's shooting for HD, but not many people are shooting for UHD 4K. And so we're very pleased that we were able to get David Fincher to commit to shooting, editing, producing House of Cards season two in 4K. And we think that most of the other main originals that we do in the future probably be 4K as well. This morning we talked about Sony giving us Breaking Bad, all five seasons in 4K. You have to watch it like for the third time all the way through. Absolutely, yes. But that's going to be a pretty impressive piece of content. So it's going to be a handful of pretty mainstream pieces, a lot of smaller stuff, and then fill in the gaps from there. So also you mentioned, is there like a broader game plan in here? Like what comes next? What's the next step to moving this kind of technology forward for Netflix? Well Ultra HD really contains three different components. There's 4K pixels, which is spatial resolution, sort of the resolution of the screen in an area sense. And then the next piece of UHD, high frame rate pictures. And so moving from 24 frames a second to 60 frames a second or 120 frames a second. And so that's I think another major advance in making pictures look better. And then the third major component of UHD is about color space and color resolution. It's high dynamic range. And that's about a brighter contrast ratio. It's about 10 bits per pixel instead of 8 bits per pixel in terms of less banding and contouring. And it's about packaging up a color space that has brighter reds and brighter greens and brighter blues. And so when you get to bright colored objects, they really look rich and bold instead of the somewhat washed out colors that you see with our sets today. One other thing I want to talk about really briefly, WebOS TV. You guys were involved with that. What was exciting about that challenge? What do those products offer that made Netflix really, really happy? You know, let me back up a bit. Television has had a channel up, channel down button that's almost seamless. You hit the button and it picks up the next channel in sort of sub-second time. And yet with the Internet, with all the technology that lives behind that, in most cases switching to an Internet app takes 5, 10, 20 seconds, which is an unconscionably large amount of time. Especially TV. You can't do this. Like I'm not even going to bother trying it. Yes. And when we've measured performance, when we've found performance improvements and measured the customer response to that, even small reductions in wait time and pause time improve the user experience and generate a better Netflix experience. But you asked about the WebOS stuff and the opportunity that's compelling there is that the apps switch back and forward in a way that's much more similar to channel up, channel down. You can have multiple apps live. You can bring a new one to the foreground. It's ready and it's waiting and it's much more seamless. And that's components of what we think of as the modern Internet connected television experience. We're anxious to push that forward. Well, cool. Thank you again for taking the time to sit down with us. Very exciting stuff and I can't wait to watch Frank Underwood do terrible, terrible things to people in 4K. Thanks again. February 14th. It's coming along soon. Great. Thanks.
 4K TVs have been news for a while now, but the big question is content. How can you watch
 anything? Enter Netflix. This year at CES, the company announced a number of partnerships
 that will make 4K streaming in your home a reality. We sat down with Chief Product Officer
 Neil Hunt to talk about how they got there and what's coming next. I'm here with Neil
 Hunt from Netflix. Neil, thanks for sitting down with us today. So you guys have had a
 very, very busy CES today about 4K streaming. It's one of the biggest stories at a CES this
 year. Tell us a little bit about how you guys got to this place. There's a lot of manufacturing
 and hardware partners lined up. What's the story behind it? How did you get here today?
 We really wanted to continue to push the envelope in terms of delivering the highest quality
 picture possible. So in the last few years, we've moved to deliver high definition HD.
 We recently started doing super high def, which is a high bit rate, high definition,
 still 1080p. And the next logical step was to embrace the 4K sets that TV manufacturers
 are building. Cool. So you mentioned the TVs that are coming out lately. It's an interesting
 dynamic that's been going on because the last year and a half, the TV industry has been
 4K is the thing. This is great. And everybody goes like, okay, cool. What can we watch?
 Do you feel like those manufacturers are relying on you guys to a certain degree? One of the
 interesting pieces, of course, is that 4K is not going to have a major lifetime on a
 plastic desk. It doesn't fit on a Blu-ray desk. And I think it's unlikely that people
 will want to upgrade their DVD players. Similarly, it's unlikely that it will be embraced rapidly
 on the broadcast and cable side. And so internet delivery is where it's at. And we want to
 be amongst the very first to deliver really good ultra high def 4K picture across the
 internet. That means doing things like embracing HEVC H.265 encoders, figuring out how to
 use those and encode properly. But then even more important, we have to go back and get
 content. And today everybody's shooting for HD, but not many people are shooting for UHD
 4K. And so we're very pleased that we were able to get David Fincher to commit to shooting,
 editing, producing House of Cards season two in 4K. And we think that most of the other
 main originals that we do in the future probably be 4K as well. This morning we talked about
 Sony giving us Breaking Bad, all five seasons in 4K.
 You have to watch it like for the third time all the way through.
 Absolutely, yes. But that's going to be a pretty impressive piece of content. So it's
 going to be a handful of pretty mainstream pieces, a lot of smaller stuff, and then fill
 in the gaps from there.
 So also you mentioned, is there like a broader game plan in here? Like what comes next? What's
 the next step to moving this kind of technology forward for Netflix?
 Well Ultra HD really contains three different components. There's 4K pixels, which is spatial
 resolution, sort of the resolution of the screen in an area sense. And then the next
 piece of UHD, high frame rate pictures. And so moving from 24 frames a second to 60 frames
 a second or 120 frames a second. And so that's I think another major advance in making pictures
 look better.
 And then the third major component of UHD is about color space and color resolution.
 It's high dynamic range. And that's about a brighter contrast ratio. It's about 10 bits
 per pixel instead of 8 bits per pixel in terms of less banding and contouring. And it's about
 packaging up a color space that has brighter reds and brighter greens and brighter blues.
 And so when you get to bright colored objects, they really look rich and bold instead of
 the somewhat washed out colors that you see with our sets today.
 One other thing I want to talk about really briefly, WebOS TV. You guys were involved
 with that. What was exciting about that challenge? What do those products offer that made Netflix
 really, really happy?
 You know, let me back up a bit. Television has had a channel up, channel down button
 that's almost seamless. You hit the button and it picks up the next channel in sort of
 sub-second time. And yet with the Internet, with all the technology that lives behind
 that, in most cases switching to an Internet app takes 5, 10, 20 seconds, which is an unconscionably
 large amount of time.
 Especially TV. You can't do this. Like I'm not even going to bother trying it.
 Yes. And when we've measured performance, when we've found performance improvements and measured
 the customer response to that, even small reductions in wait time and pause time improve
 the user experience and generate a better Netflix experience.
 But you asked about the WebOS stuff and the opportunity that's compelling there is that
 the apps switch back and forward in a way that's much more similar to channel up, channel
 down. You can have multiple apps live. You can bring a new one to the foreground. It's
 ready and it's waiting and it's much more seamless. And that's components of what we
 think of as the modern Internet connected television experience. We're anxious to push
 that forward.
 Well, cool. Thank you again for taking the time to sit down with us. Very exciting stuff
 and I can't wait to watch Frank Underwood do terrible, terrible things to people in
 4K. Thanks again.
 February 14th. It's coming along soon.
 Great. Thanks.