Several Amazon and Netflix shows have made their way to popular torrent sites thanks to what could be a loophole in the vendors security setup. One popular torrent website lists single episodes of Marvel's Jessica Jones, each with massive footprints averaging 14 GBs each.
Back in August we saw the first Netflix 4K content - an episode of Breaking Bad - hit torrent sites, since then there was no more movement regarding 4K releases.
With the release of the Roku's new streaming player - which supports 4K - there have been many more leaks of hit TV shows from the Netflix 4K library. This is now drawing questions as to whether the Roku device is the weak link in the chain by not using High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection 2.2 (HDCP) - a mechanism that is believed to still be secure from ambitious pirates trying to leak content.
As for the leaks from the Amazon 4K library, the Amazon Fire TV could be what's responsible. The Fire TV uses the weaker HDCP 1.4b, and could be the reason for the leak of shows such as The Man in the High Castle, currently viewable on Amazon's TV service.
With Blu-Ray being adapted to support 4K content, and as we see more people switching to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compression standard we will most likely see an uptake 4K torrents as opposed to their 480p, 720p and 1080p counterparts.
HEVC was only formally ratified as a standard in April 2013, therefore many devices do not yet support files which were compressed with the HEVC standard, in future though, it will become extremely popular as it can shrink a 15 GB 4K file to around 3 GB, and what it can do for an entire TV season in 1080p or 720p is even more remarkable, Netflix's Narcos in 720p encoded with HEVC aka H.265 is 6.66 times smaller the same show encoded with the H.264 format.
Source: TorrentFreak
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