A UHD bluray PS4 would be cool but my faithful and usually correct crystal ball tells me that UHD Bluray will be a niche of a niche of a tiny niche.
Now, a PS4 that can play 4k online videos through Netflix or Amazon? Heck yes!
Sony is bleeding money - business strategy discussion
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Now, a PS4 that can play 4k online videos through Netflix or Amazon? Heck yes!
PS4 may not have the processing for 4K video.
You're right about UHD Blu Ray being a niche. But 4k streams will not be good enough, unless they really increase the bitrate, at which point a lot of people's broadband connections will be insufficient. Then there is the issue of bandwidth caps people have to deal with.
I think Sony hopes UHD takes off and there is an upgrade cycle of some kind. Whether a Playstation that pushes UHD would spur that upgrade cycle is not clear.
I guess how they react to UHD will be telling as to whether putting Blu-Ray in the PS3 was ultimately worth it to them.
You're right about UHD Blu Ray being a niche. But 4k streams will not be good enough, unless they really increase the bitrate, at which point a lot of people's broadband connections will be insufficient. Then there is the issue of bandwidth caps people have to deal with.
I think Sony hopes UHD takes off and there is an upgrade cycle of some kind. Whether a Playstation that pushes UHD would spur that upgrade cycle is not clear.
I guess how they react to UHD will be telling as to whether putting Blu-Ray in the PS3 was ultimately worth it to them.
Netflix and YouTube use HEVC (H.265) rather than H.264, which cuts the bitrate requirements for a given resolution by about half, but is, of course, a processing hog.
Good candidate for CPU/GPU workload split?
It's always the chicken and the egg thing. If we have nothing to motivate ISPs and people to get faster connections, it will never happen.
If I'm honest, 4k at 15Mbps kinda defeats the point, but I stand to be corrected.
I think I'm the only person I know who actually watches Bluray movies as I prefer the quality so I'm also a niche.
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I think that may be the case as gpu's with hardware h265 decode are only just starting to appear, I don't know if the consoles got that so they would have to brute force it with cpu/gpu software decode.
From what I've read on various movie making forums, h265 is about 4x compression over h264 at similar quality, so that 15mbps h265 can look as good as 60mbps h264. I've done over 100+ video shoots on my Sony AX100 4k h264 60mbps video camera for work and find it's quality is really good overall, so 15mbps h265 could work.
The UK Government recently ran an ad campaign encouraging people to upgrade to fibre. It didn't actually describe any benefits. 
Years of waiting to finally be connected to fibre, now it's available to me, I'm not interested. I find my 12 Mbps copper connection is perfectly adequate and the significant added cost of fibre (50% or more current monthly payout, I think) makes it poor value, with added cost for negligible benefit. If I was downloading large games, it'd have some value, but then the price of the games would be higher than discs too, so all in all a not-insignificant increase in total expense to play games.
And I'd rather have 15 Mbps 1080p video than 4k meself!
Years of waiting to finally be connected to fibre, now it's available to me, I'm not interested. I find my 12 Mbps copper connection is perfectly adequate and the significant added cost of fibre (50% or more current monthly payout, I think) makes it poor value, with added cost for negligible benefit. If I was downloading large games, it'd have some value, but then the price of the games would be higher than discs too, so all in all a not-insignificant increase in total expense to play games.And I'd rather have 15 Mbps 1080p video than 4k meself!
I'm sure the new codec will be good, but the real comparison will be against UHD Bluray discs which will allow much, much greater bandwidth for those 3 people who will care enough, me included.
AND If my Mac keeps autocorrecting Bluray to Blurry, I will actually punch it.
Well I only really see the benefits when rarely downloading a ton of stuff and my torrent client goes up to a crazy 8-10MBytes/sec, and also when I happen to upload anything - that's the real difference. Everything else just works, such as Amazon at 1080p which didn't always work before, even though my old connection was about 18Mbit/s.The UK Government recently ran an ad campaign encouraging people to upgrade to fibre. It didn't actually describe any benefits.
Realistically, it is not needed. I'm just a sucker for bigger and better things.
Bluray discs are what, 40/60Mbps? And it shows, compared to Amazon's 1080p, and it will most likely still hold up very well against 15mbps 4k video.
From the lists of early Blu-ray analysis online you'll see that 16-30Mbps is common for Blu-ray H.264 encodes. The 40-60Mbps are more for MPEG-2 which has worse compression quality. With 4K you also have the fact that a lot of the time your compression ratio can be higher naturally because there will be a lot more value repetition - the "subjective" equivalent compression ratio is higher for HEVC. So, I think there is value to 4K at 15Mbps HEVC as representing something better than Blu-ray, but for sure a physical storage with a higher bitrate is going to be the high bar.
(I too am one of the few that purchases movies on Blu-ray and watches them due to quality).
Ah yes you're right!
Have you seen british telecoms's standard offering
38mb/s fibre 20gb a month download cap
so you can download for 3 hours a month
time to download a large modern game = 2 months
time to download same game with BT's standard 8mb/s unlimited broadband = about 14 hours
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No one gets fiber on BT for the standard offering, I'd hope.
Both AMD and Intel have mentioned hardware-assisted HEVC decode that reuses some of the common blocks between H.264 and HEVC. It's not a pure hardware solution of course, so some stuff gets implemented in software, which will consume power. I think that if Samsung is using 4 Cortex A15 CPUs to decode HEVC Netflix in it's newest 4K TVs, surely the PS4 and Xbox One have the power to do it, but, it *will* consume power, and not a device you'd want to use long-term to watch 4K content on.
I don't think either nextgen console idles lower power so it's not like you're going to use more power than what playing a blu-ray or movie would on the same console.
I'm thinking on a really long term horizon, like say, Xbox 360 for streaming Netflix vs. an Apple TV v3. It's *because* it isn't low power vs those tiny STB devices (that currently don't exist) that you wouldn't want to use it vs. the PS4/Xbox One you already have.
But besides, all of this is moot, they'd need to rev the consoles to do HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 before Hollywood would let them access any 4K premium content. And the chances of that happening any time soon is close to nil.
But besides, all of this is moot, they'd need to rev the consoles to do HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 before Hollywood would let them access any 4K premium content. And the chances of that happening any time soon is close to nil.
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