With the increasing push of 4K TVs and more native 4K content sources appearing week by week, the PS4 and Xbox One are starting to look more and more uncomfortable as they via for top spot as the number one box in your living room.
Netflix were the ones that started the rumour at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show iwhen, according to The Huffington Post, Netflix’s Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt suggested during a press conference about Netflix’s support for High Dynamic Range technology that Sony had ‘promised’ a PS4 hardware revision that would give the console 4K video capabilities.
Then during his Xbox Spring Showcase event keynote last week, Microsoft’s head of Xbox Phil Spencer talked about future of “hardware innovation” for the console, similar to the ways PCs evolve.
In a speech to reporters, he said that the Xbox One could see a future in which it is upgraded, rather than replaced by new consoles.
One last point to stress is that if the predictions of new 4K-capable consoles this year come true, the upgrade will almost certainly only affect video streaming; 4K gaming at the moment requires a high-end PC and would probably be to costly to bake into a console for a reasonable price. Sony or Microsoft have not confirmed or denied anything specific yet but I would expect to see a potential update that would allow at the very least 4k streaming with an upgraded chipset and HDMI ports
