Delivering Breaking Bad on Netflix in Ultra HD 4K

This week Netflix is pleased to begin streaming all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad in UltraHD 4K. Breaking Bad in 4K comes from Sony Pictures Entertainment’s beautiful remastering of Breaking Bad from the original film negatives. This 4K experience is available on select 4K Smart TVs.

As pleased as I am to announce Breaking Bad in 4K, this blog post is also intended to highlight the collaboration between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Netflix to modernize the digital supply chain that transports digital media from content studios, like Sony Pictures, to streaming retailers, like Netflix.

Netflix and Sony agreed on an early subset of IMF for the transfer of the video and audio files for Breaking Bad. IMF stands for Interoperable Master Format, an emerging SMPTE specification governing file formats and metadata for digital media archiving and B2B exchange.

IMF specifies fundamental building blocks like immutable objects, checksums, globally unique identifiers, and manifests (cpl). These building blocks hold promise for vastly improving the efficiency, accuracy, and scale of the global digital supply chain.

At Netflix, we are excited about IMF and we are committing significant R&D efforts towards adopting IMF for content ingestion. Netflix has an early subset of IMF in production today and we will support most of the current IMF App 2 draft by the end of 2014.

We are also developing a roadmap for IMF App 2 Extended and Extended+. We are pleased that Sony Pictures is an early innovator in this space and we are looking forward to the same collaboration with additional content studio partners.

Breaking Bad is joining House of Cards season 2 and the Moving Art documentaries in our global 4K catalog. We are also adding a few more 4K movies for our USA members. We have added Smurfs 2, Ghostbusters, and Ghostbusters 2 in the United States. All of these movies were packaged in IMF by Sony Pictures.

By Kevin McEntee, VP Digital Supply Chain, Netflix