Correct, if you use Linux you can pay a monthly fee to Netflix for the privilege of installing spyware on your machine to view 720p video.

Meanwhile torrents are a search away and they give me a no-nonsense .mkv file in 5 minutes, to watch wherever and whenever I want: phone, PC, TV, internet or no internet. The choice is easy.

> for the privilege of installing spyware on your machine

Not sure about this. Firefox and Opera both support 720p.

But, because of their choices here - or the terms of the content deals they've signed, idk - Netflix doesn't get as much money from me as they could. 720p is not sufficiently better than 480p (to me) to warrant paying them for 'standard' service, let alone their premium tier at $20/mo. So I just get their basic service.

Their loss, really, although collectively the Linux customer base is probably tiny enough that it's inconsequential to them.

> Not sure about this. Firefox and Opera both support 720p.

Don't you have to enable widevine to get Netflix in Firefox?

Yes, good point, I don't typically think of that as spyware, but it is.

On some devices Kodi can pass through to the platform native DRM if that supports higher resolutions, but bluntly you will be wasting your life waiting for updates as it breaks constantly.

Or the official apps right, that page is just about browsers (and implicitly unofficial apps)? So you could have the Kodi & Netflix apps on an Android TV (e.g. Nvidia Shield) device and have 4K Netflix.

I imagine Netflix gathers a lot of viewing data, and I can see a time when ads make it into the streaming platforms natively. Cable TV started out as an ad-free offering, and now it's almost 50% ads.