Streaming in 1080p on Netflix
takes up 4.7GB/hour. So a regular one-hour episode of something debiting less than 5GB from your allotment is no big deal. However, with 4K, you've got
quadruple the pixel count, so you're burning through 18.8GB/hour. Even if you're streaming with the new h.265 codec—which cuts the bit rate by about half, but still hasn't found its way into many consumer products—you're still looking at 7GB/hour.
But you're not watching just one episode, are you? Of course not! You're binging on
House of Cards, watching the whole series if not in one weekend then certainly in one month. That's 639 minutes of top-quality TV, which in 4K tallies up to 75GB if you're using the latest and greatest codec, and nearly 200GB if not. That means, best case scenario, a quarter of your cap—a third, if you're a U-Verse customer with a 250GB cap—spent on one television show. Throw in a normal month's internet usage, and you're toast.
Prefer movies to TV shows? Sure! Sony's Unlimited Video service has 70 4K titles and counting available to stream, but good luck renting very many of them each month. A Sony rep has said that a single two-hour movie download
will eat up 40GB. Basically, you get seven movies in 4K and you're done. Fourteen hours of streaming for the entire month. And that's assuming you don't use the internet for anything else, at all, ever.
