I think it varies and depends a lot on your connection speed and latency from the nearest source. There's a lot of effort to give a "good enough" quality at di

I think it varies and depends a lot on your connection speed and latency from the nearest source. There's a lot of effort to give a "good enough" quality at different screen sizes, throughput and devices. Even if you look at torrent content, you can find a given movie anywhere from a few gb (1080p) to a few dozen gb in size at 4k with higher relative throughput and quality. Not to mention the encoder settings. Personally, I don't go for the highest quality encodes because I don't see the difference well enough. I tend to favor x265 over x264 only because the blur degredation is less annoying than blotchiness imo. When you are streaming, the level of encoding will swap out, even at the same resolution a number of times depending on what you're getting. You may well do better with a 1080p stream over a 4k stream depending on your screen and device's upscaling behavior. 4k takes at least 4x the bandwidth, and has tighter latency needs. There are others that can go over this and explain it much better than I can, but it's not malicious, it's partly cost sure, but it's also a matter of what your connection can handle.