Netflix Spatial Audio: Full List Only Available on Premium Plan
Hear this: Netflix hopes audiophiles will upgrade to the Premium tier at $20 a month to access the streamer’s full collection of content that supports spatial audio.
Netflix originally announced support for theater-like spatial audio – using existing stereo speakers – last summer. Spatial audio, in theory, provides a 360-degree audio experience, including the reproduction of sounds designed to come from behind the viewer.
Netflix has announced that space audio is now available on more than 700 of its most-watched titles, including “Stranger Things”, “The Watcher”, “Wednesday” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”. He also plans to add spatial sound to popular new tracks as they are released, including “You,” “Your Place or Mine,” “Luther: The Fallen Sun,” and “Tour de France.” To see the full list of titles with spatial audio, users can search for the term “spatial audio” on Netflix.
However, the extensive list of movies and TV shows with spatial audio is only available on Netflix Premium, the company’s most expensive plan. Customers with a Standard or Basic service will enjoy spatialized audio “but only on a small number of selected titles”, according to Netflix.
“Netflix’s Premium package already delivers the highest quality viewing experience,” Rishu Arora, director of product management, said in a blog post. “Now with Netflix Spatial Audio, our Premium members will enjoy the highest quality sound experience available, whether they’re watching at home on a TV or computer, or on the go with a phone or tablet. .”
Spatial audio is a “game changer for the Premium plan viewing experience,” added Arora, which brings another high-end feature to the tier in addition to 4K, HDR, Dolby Atmos, and Netflix Calibrated Mode.
Spatial audio from Netflix can be reproduced through the built-in stereo speakers on any device; That said, according to the company, its spatial audio support is primarily optimized for laptops and tablets. The streamer pioneered spatial audio using Sennheiser’s AMBEO 2-Channel Spatial Audio, which translates original immersive mixes into two-channel audio.
Meanwhile, Netflix is also increasing the number of download devices available to Premium plan members from four to six devices in total, allowing you to download and watch select titles in offline mode. Netflix’s Standard plan allows only two devices at a time to download content; the basic level only provides one device; and the new Basic With Ads plan does not provide any download capability.
Here’s a video from Netflix that supposedly lets you “hear the magic of spatial audio” in clips from “6 Underground,” the 2019 action-thriller starring Ryan Reynolds, and “Stranger Things 4”:
Pictured Above: Jenna Ortega as Goody Addams in Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’