As more video moves to higher resolutions (such as 4K) the amount of bandwidth wasted by inefficient encoding increases exponentially.<p>While consumers only care if the quality is &quot;acceptable&quot;, it&#x27;s pretty easy to tell the difference between a crisp 4K picture and a 1080p picture, and also easier to see encoding or bitrate artifacts.<p>So I think this is probably an attempt to improve the margins a bit on content delivery costs without sacrificing quality.<p>Netflix has also embraced 4K content with its original series, so it is in a unique position to leverage the shift to higher resolution content for maximum profitability.