Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), has come out in support of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's assertion that 25 Mbps should be the baseline definition for broadband service.
Speaking during the fourth-quarter earnings call, Hastings said that to support emerging services like ultra high-definition video and videoconferencing, consumers will need higher speeds than what is the norm today.
"Once you got an Ultra HD video stream that's 15 megs just a single stream and you're going to want video conferencing, you're going to want online learning, you're going to want all kinds of different applications monitoring of your home, these kinds of things on video," Hastings said during the earnings call. "So 25 megs is kind of baseline for the next five years as opposed to the past five years."
According to a recent Akamai report, only 19 percent of U.S. households have a bandwidth connection that could provide consistent support for 4K video.
Netflix has been making inroads into 4K by launching its own content library last year with plans to support other High Dynamic Range streaming services.
Much like its proposal to raise the broadband bar from 4 to 10 Mbps, the FCC's 25 Mbps proposal and Netflix's support will be met with resistance from traditional telcos like AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ), which claim that most consumers don't need higher speeds.
For more:
- Multichannel News has this article
- here's the Netflix earnings transcript
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