Washington: American content streaming platform and entertainment production company Netflix is testing for spatial audio support that is a feature on Apple’s Airpods Pro and Airpods Max.
Apple’s AirPods Pro and AirPods Max already have a few of those popular services supporting their Spatial Audio feature and according to Mashable, now it seems that Netflix will finally be catching up soon.
Spatial Audio is the marketing term Apple has used to name this special implementation of immersive sound, a feature that Samsung calls “360-degree audio” on the Galaxy Buds Pro.
This feature uses a combination of gyro sensors and directional audio to track users’ head movements and the position of the iPhone or iPad. The effect is that sound feels like to be coming from the right direction or position even when you move your head around. This obviously doesn’t happen magically for all kinds of audio content and is a feature that has to be enabled separately by the sources.
Spatial Audio is currently supported by Apple’s own Apple TV and content streaming platforms like Disney+ and Hulu. As it can be seen this short-list conspicuously leaves out streaming king Netflix, but that may not be the case soon.
As per Mashable, Netflix has actually been working on this feature since December of the previous year. It might be ready to launch by the spring of 2021, but the catalog of supported content will reportedly start out quite small. Netflix might time it with the announcement of new movies and shows that will be able to take better advantage of the Spatial Audio feature.