Black Friday will be the perfect opportunity to pick up a 4K TV at a healthy discount applied, but it's not just TVs that have embraced 4K resolutions, monitors have, too. However, you may be surprised to find that owning a 4K monitor doesn't necessarily mean you can watch 4K content on your PC. And in the case of Netflix, chances are you probably can't.
This week, Netflix and Microsoft are rolling out support for 4K streaming on Windows 10. But your current PC, however powerful, probably won't be compatible. As The Verge points out, in order for Netflix 4K streams to work you're going to need Intel's latest 7th-gen Kaby Lake processor. You'll also need to watch using Microsoft's Edge browser.
Such restrictions may seem overly harsh, but it's not just Netflix that imposed them. The blame also lies with Hollywood. Netflix uses the 10-bit HEVC video compression standard, also known as H.265, and Hollywood insists on DRM wrapped around its content.
H.265 is a successor to the widely used H.264 video compression standard. It offers double the data compression rate of H.264 while retaining the same video quality, or much higher quality video at the same compression. So you can see why Netflix embraced it.
Any platform wishing to play H.265 content requires hardware decoding support. Intel's Kaby Lake processors are the first to offer full hardware acceleration support for encoding and decoding. Older processors can decode the streams, but in order to do so they use significantly higher CPU utilization and therefore power. Kaby Lake offers the required power efficiency missing from previous Intel chips as well as 10-bit HEVC support.
The Microsoft Edge requirement is due to the use of digital rights management (DRM) to protect the streams from being recorded and copied. Edge fully supports this protection.
Intel's Kaby Lake processors are not widely available yet, making streaming Netflix at 4K on your Windows 10 PC a very niche appeal right now. There's also much easier ways to unlock 4K Netflix streaming using a dedicated streaming device. Your 4K TV may already support it, and if not, then devices including the Chromecast Ultra, Roku 4, and Xbox One S are among a growing list of devices that do. Netflix publishes a regularly updated list of supported hardware.