That might be changing sooner than you think.

Today Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt told The Verge that Netflix expects to be streaming video at the massive 3,840-by-2,160 pixel 4K resolution in the fairly near future: this year or next. If you thought Netflix was a data hog before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now we know why Netflix recently unveiled its speed list of the 17 fastest Internet service providers in America.

“We have work to do with the compression and decode capability,” Hunt admitted, but he noted that Netflix’ own House of Cards was shot in 4K.

Assuming a massive amount of compression would need to take place in order to be able to stream 4K video reliably and quickly, the question becomes: What kind of hardware will be necessary to run full-res Netflix in the near future? Smart TVs, and appliances like Xboxes, Wiis, and Apple TVs might need very significant upgrades to have the kind of onboard power to run real-time decompression for that much video. Not to mention much more on-board storage, even if just for buffering.

One other thing Hunt wants to see from video producers? A higher frame rate.

Hunt says we’ve now pretty much maxed out the resolution of our eyes but that 60 frames/second would make for a much better video experience than the current 24 or 30.

photo credit: pkingDesign via photopin cc

Our team will be off to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas soon, and we’ll get plenty of glimpses of the future of technology there. We’ve all heard a lot of promises. But here are some things we’d love to see and use in real life in the near future — whether or not they’re at CES.

We’re not sure if we can get our wish, but this is the list of the coolest technologies that we can’t wait to use. I’ve relied on staff recommendations and other big thinkers for these tips. Thanks, all.

Tell us which one is your favorite in the poll, or suggest your own in the comments.

Google Glass

This technology is one of the truly inspired products coming down the road. It combines an eyeglass-style display with computing power and wireless technology that can deliver information to you based on what you look at in your surrounding environment. Project Glass promises to deliver information to you the instant you need it, like identifying the face of someone standing in front of you. Or so we hope.

Self-driving cars

Another innovation from Google is going through rigorous testing and the regulatory mill. These cars drive themselves based on computing, wireless, and camera technologies that can make a robot-driven car safer than a human-driven one. You can sit in the driver’s seat and do your email, but you can also override the controls if necessary. Once it’s polished, we’d love to take the car for a spin. But not before they get the bugs out.

Apple television

Okay, this mythical beast doesn’t really have to be made by Apple. But we need a TV that truly combines the best of the Internet and the best of traditional cable television. Apple has hinted something is coming that will transform the living room. We want to be able to play free or 99-cent apps on the high-definition screen and access our favorite TV shows and first-run movies. We have no clue, though, when this rumored Apple device will really arrive (if ever).

A 72-core Tegra 4-based tablet computer

Nvidia hasn’t announced anything yet, but the rumor is it will describe its next-generation Tegra chip at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. If that happens, you can expect that dozens of tablets and smartphones will follow. Tablets thrive on efficient battery use as well as performance. But Nvidia has been moving down the path of creating Tegra technology that offers both low-power consumption and outstanding 3D graphics and processing power at the same time. It’s time for another great leap that could put tablets on par with — or ahead of — the traditional PC.

Cool wireless technologies that don’t make us glow

The bottleneck in delivering fast Internet service to homes and mobile devices has strangled a lot of innovations. Bridging the last mile and delivering blazing-fast speeds to both home and mobile users is one of the great challenges facing us. It could be done with a huge investment in infrastructure, but smart technology might make it a reality as well. Steve Perlman (of Rearden and formerly the head of OnLive) has demoed Project DIDO, a distributed wireless Internet technology that gets around bottlenecks and delivers awesomeness in the not-so-distant future. We hope it’s real. And it would be great and necessary bonus if these technologies were really safe as well.

Cheap rides into space

I’m still waiting for the Southwest Airlines of space travel to arrive. Maybe $99 to the moon and back? After all, we want to be space tourists one day. The space shuttle has died, but maybe private companies will make it happen.

Better robots

It would be nice if we could count on the help of household robots and maybe get all of these great gadgets made by robots working in factories in the U.S. I’d like to try out a few personal robots, once they slim down in size and become a little more humanoid.

Indoor location

CSR’s Sirf Technologies division has figured out how to map indoor locations when you’re walking with your mobile phone inside a building. Now we have to see it in practice. Companies like WifiSLAM are hoping to make this real. We can’t wait until we can find our way through the giant hotel-casinos of Las Vegas without getting lost.

4K televisions that cost $500

I know that 4K TV, or those with four times as many pixels as today’s high-definition TVs, are going to be plentiful at CES. In the past year, these so-called Ultra HD TVs have debuted at prices at $25,000 or so. Can we skip the whole learning curve part and jump to the $500 model soon?

A.I./brains

I need a better brain. Or a brain enhancement. I’m counting on Jeff Hawkins’ Grok technology, which promises to deliver “big data” analysis based on the processing that resembles what happens in the human brain. Or something like it. It’s like those chips in William Gibson’s novel Johnny Mnemonic.

Personal gaming

Will Wright shared a vision last year for personal gaming, or a mobile game that was smart enough to know your interests, know your location, understand your context, and then deliver a surprising, fun gaming experience to you. The game collects a lot of big data about you and processes that. Then it creates a custom experience, a game made for just one person. You.

An awesome game console

How about a great video game console? One with free-to-play games with both traditional game controls and gesture recognition. I’d love to have a wide variety of indie games as well as blockbusters, and I’d like to extend my play to mobile game platforms and the web. Add backward-compatibility and cloud computing. Let’s hope that Sony and Microsoft are listening. Nintendo’s Wii U doesn’t quite do it for me.

Quantified self gadgets that automate calorie counting

We’ve got devices like Striiv that can count our steps. Other gadgets (like the Basis Health Tracker) can monitor our sleep, record our heart rate, and sync with the cloud. But we’d really like to get a device that photographs our meals (or does something like that) and calculates how many calories we’ll consume. This kind of technology could complete the loop in terms of figuring out our physical activity and our food intake, giving us the data we could use to calculate whether we are exercising enough and eating right. (VentureBeat’s John Koetsier supplied this idea, based on the “<a href=”“quantified self” movement where people try to measure everything about themselves).

If this list of new technologies doesn’t sound ambitious enough, we’re also waiting for some pie-in-the-sky science fiction to become reality. We’d like to go for a ride in the Star Trek Holodeck, a virtual reality simulation that is indistinguishable from reality, or live in the Metaverse virtual world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. And I’d like to use that gesture-based computer that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. But we’re assuming it’s going to take a while before the tech and entertainment industries can deliver on those visions.

Now if Moore’s Law ever stopped in its tracks, the engine behind all of this change would grind to a halt. Then we could say that things might truly get boring. On the other hand, nanotechnology might be quite useful in replacing semiconductor manufacturing with something else. So we’re not counting on getting bored anytime soon.

Image credits: Google, cmmorrison/Flickr, guilhermescha/Flickr, Nvidia, Lionsgate Television, SpaceX, Nao, Microsoft/Bing, LG, VLADGRIN/Shutterstock, Samsung, Samir Torres/VentureBeat

Drool now or drool later, but LG just announced more details about its 2013 TV lineup, which it will unveil at CES in a week.

For 2013 the Korean company is focusing on smart TV enhancements like Smart Home, melding TV and web with quick access to apps, content, news sites, and weather; and Magic Remote, which enables you to control your TV by pointing, Nintendo Wii-style, or scrolling, or gesturing, or simply talking to your TV to change the channel or search for programming.

LG is also enhancing what it calls Smart Sharing, which enables owners to transfer, mirror, or share content to and from smartphones, tablets, and other devices; and LG Cloud, which enables streaming content from just about anywhere.

All of which is interesting. But the real lust-worthy item on display is its 84-inch Ultra HD television, which just launched in late October.

This TV isn’t just room-dwarfingly gargantuan — it’s also got four times the resolution of standard high-definition TVs, with 3,840 horizontal pixels combining with 2,160 vertical pixels to provide a very sweet 8,294,400 pixels of silky-smooth video pleasure. That’s 3.1 million pixels more than in an Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (although, of course, on a much bigger screen).

But get ready to hit up the boss for a raise — that 84-inch Ultra HD TV will set you back a budget-busting $20,000.

To drive all this wealth of pixels and new intelligence, LG is updating the brains of their TVs, boosting CPU speeds by 120 percent and GPUs by 300 percent, which it says will translate to clearer images.

You’ll need that extra power, since the new Ultra HD resolution is completely unsupported by any content recorded at such high quality, so the TV depends on upconverting to provide a semblance of what higher high-def would look like.

A couple other welcome notes: LG’s new “Cinema Screen” design ethos means smaller bezels, providing more TV with less frame, and a better 3D experience with less flicker.

We’ll have more on all the latest CES announcement as the VentureBeat team CES team hits the road for Las Vegas shortly.

Forget “4K.” The next-generation high definition standard will be officially called “Ultra High Definition” when it hits homes, the Consumer Electronics Association announced yesterday.

Current HDTV displays top out at a resolution of 1080p, also known as “Full HDTV.” 4K is a standard currently being used in theaters, and from my experience it provides an almost film-like image quality to the big screen. When it comes to the home, though, it looks like the CEA is aiming for a more marketable and less technical term for the next big HD upgrade.

So what goes into Ultra HD? According to the CEA, it will sport a resolution of at least eight million active pixels, with a minimum size of 3,840 by 2,1060 pixels. Displays also need to maintain a 16 by 9 aspect ratio (the widescreen format that’s already required for HDTVs). Ultra HD devices have to include at least one digital input that can handle 4K video without upconversion.

For most consumers, though, Ultra HD may be more than they need. Current 1080p HDTVs work well up to 80 inches — so unless you go beyond that size, 4K isn’t really worth it for most viewing distances. Home theater gurus, for the most part, also feel that the idea of 4K TVs in the home is “stupid, stupid, stupid.”

The Ultra HD name is even more confusing considering that Japan’s NHK just received approval for “Ultra-High Definition TV” to describe 8K TVs. (Yup, you guessed it, 8K is the next step beyond 4K.) Now it seems like NHK may have to come up with a new way to describe its next-next gen technology.

We’ve dropped a line to CEA, asking them to explain some of this naming confusion.

Update:  A CEA representative clarified the UHD confusion, saying that the group was aware of the other next-gen HD names. They noted that CEA found market research for the Ultra HD name tested well with consumers, and that they understand the technology as something superior to current HD standards. They also added that manufacturers can add modifiers to clarify their products.

ITU chose the term Ultra High Definition for both 4K and 8K. NHK uses the brand Super Hi-Vision to refer to its 8k technology, a long term project not expected to be fielded until after 2020. Our UHD working group was aware of both of these terms.

CEA’s terminology is for consumers and manufacturers are free to add an additional modifier to our UHD nomenclature, such as UHD 4K, should they chose.

Sony, meanwhile,  is saying it will still use the 4K label alongside UHD. A Sony spokesperson sent us the following statement over e-mail:

Sony lauds the CEA’s efforts to come up with a common language to describe the next generation high-definition technology. However, to ensure clarity for consumers and delineate between today’s and tomorrow’s technology, Sony will continue to use the 4K moniker for its products and will market its future products as 4K ultra high-definition (4K UHD).

Above: LG’s 84-inch 4K TV.