News: 4K House Of Cards Won't Be Gentle On Usage Caps

We've already noted how bandwidth caps likely won't fare very well with the arrival of 4K video, even with the help of next-generation compression codecs. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is already on record stating their upcoming 4K streams will need at least 15 Mbps and would be most optimal with 50 Mbps. Sony's upcoming 4K film service will similarly plow through gigabytes like a hot knife through butter. 

With everybody currently binge watching Netflix's "House of Cards," Gizmodo quite correctly points out that binge-watching the series in 4K will be anything but gentle on your bandwidth cap:

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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.

It's even worse for many DSL users, whose caps are as low as 150 GB. And a few scattered ISPs (not even mentioning satellite broadband) take the cap limbo lower than that. Broadband ISPs have always insisted that their usage-caps would scale with necessity (instead of being tightened like a noose to hamper video competitors), and 4K video appears to be something that could test that claim.