Netflix won’t play at 4K: how to fix it + Tips and Tricks

With everyone at home taking advantage of the Christmas period, you may have noticed that on some occasion your broadcasts do not have the highest quality of service. And it is that although luckily we are not experiencing a situation similar to the one previously seen during the first stages of confinement, it is still possible that we suffer the effects of a saturation of the lines.

That is why we want to dedicate this quick and simple tutorial to explain you how you can configure your Netflix application to reproduce these contents always under the highest quality.

Choosing the right Netflix plan and content

First of all, it is worth noting that only Netflix Premium plans have this option available for 4K content, so if we have a lower plan, we can only reach resolutions up to HD at 1080p.

On the other hand, it is also possible that the content that we are trying to reproduce not available in 4K. And it is because they are not marked on the title cards, on many occasions it is possible that we are trying to load incompatible content. To do this, we will only have to enter “4K” in the search bar to see only the titles that offer an Ultra HD transmission.

Use the right device

Whether on a TV, computer, or smartphone, our device may not be compatible with the playback of content in 4K. Although in these cases Netflix will continue trying to transmit in this resolution (and therefore consuming a greater amount of data), our device will not show it as such..

Set up Netflix to play in 4K

Even if we have the Premium plan contracted and our devices are compatible, Netflix is ​​not set to stream in 4K by default. And is that normally the default transmission quality setting is set to “Auto” mode, which will try to use the best possible combination of quality and data usage depending on the device we are using.

However, you can change this setting to set the highest possible playback option. We will only have to load Netflix profile in which we want to make these changes (yes, in the case of wanting to change it in all the account profiles we will have to repeat this step one by one), access the option of «Account» or «My profile» from the options menu, and access the “Playback settings”.

Once here we will have to choose the setting of «High» to ensure that even though data usage may be higher, our broadcast will not have any limitations regarding visual quality.

That said, it should be noted that this option will apply to all content and devices, so if we usually switch between devices such as mobiles, or if we have a limited data plan, we must be more careful with these types of options.