According to a report from Forbes, Netflix predicts that Sony and Microsoft will roll out updated versions of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One that will be capable of 4K video resolutions. When will this happen? They say it could happen as early as this year.
Netflix first started talking about this publicly at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in January when, according to The Huffington Post, Netflix’s Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt suggested during a press conference about Netflix’s support for High Dynamic Range technology that Sony had ‘promised’ a PS4 hardware revision that would give the console 4K video capabilities.

When I contacted Netflix for more background on this statement it understandably declined to provide more detail on the reported Sony ‘promise’, stressing that clearly it isn’t in a position to speak definitively on Sony’s plans. Netflix did, though, provide more detail on the thought processes Hunt was alluding to during the CES press conference. Namely that he believes that when both the PS4 and Xbox One consoles do their traditional two-year hardware refresh (which would be due around October or November) they will add the necessary components to deliver 4K video playback.

If this is at all true, and that's a major "if," what would each company have to do to support 4K video? It seems as though there are a few things they could do. First would be to add in a new chip that can decode the HEVC 4K UHD streaming format that Netflix and Amazon use. It would also make sense that both companies also update their HDMI ports to version 2.0 that would allow the systems to push 4K at 60FPS to televisions. This move to 4K video would, presumably, not really have much of an impact on either system's gaming capabilities.

Of course, if this is true, Sony and Microsoft are going to have bigger issues on their hands here: The millions upon millions of people who already purchased a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.