The Blu-Ray Disc Association has announced the final version of the Ultra HD Blu-ray standard, and the new capabilities should offer an impressive upgrade for those looking to upgrade their movie collections to 4K. In addition to the aforementioned 4K capabilities (3840×2160), the new Ultra HD standard supports High Dynamic Range lighting, a wide color gamut (up to Rec.2020), and a feature dubbed “digital bridge.” More on this last bit in a moment.

The content industry previously released a number of “Mastered in 4K” titles as a way to cash in on the nascent UHD trend. But the improvements from remastering movies at 1080p — sometimes with slightly higher bitrates, thanks to only putting the feature film on the disc, rather than bundling in features and extras — were fairly small.

As we previously theorized, Ultra HD Blu-ray will use the H.265 codec and ship on double and triple-layer discs of 66GB and 100GB capacities, respectively. The switch to H.265 content, combined with the larger file sizes, will leave ample room for even three-hour films to pack on to single discs, though the longest movies may need to ship extra scenes and features on separate media. UHD Blu-ray also includes support for DTS:X, Dolby Atmos, and Auro-3D, for those of you who have multi-speaker surround configurations.

What’s a digital bridge?

The official spec for the new Ultra HD Blu-ray standard doesn’t clearly state how the digital bridge feature will function. It says that consumers will be able to “”view their content across the range of in-home and mobile devices.” Fortunately, there’s supplementary information online, if you know where to look for it.

The new digital bridge feature is designed to give customers more flexibility in how they consume content. In 2015, simply having the content on a disc isn’t good enough — not when people are used to watching Netflix on a tablet, then transferring to a different device and picking up where they left off.

The digital bridge devices contemplated by the draft documents available online don’t appear to be systems that consumers could build themselves. Instead, you’ll buy a UHD Blu-ray player from Samsung or Sony that offers this feature as standard. It goes without saying that the platform is heavily locked down.

The entire process of validating a disc for digital bridging and any charges associated with accessing the content will be handled via remote servers; DRM functions will not reside inside the digital bridge export function (DBEF). Digital bridging is going to be standard on all UHD discs but isn’t mandatory for Blu-rays (conventional Blu-ray discs can support it or not as they choose).

As far as I can tell, customers aren’t required to connect to an online service to watch a physical disc directly in the Blu-ray player; the authorization is only required for streaming that content to another platform. There’s a substantial list of assumptions and requirements listed below (keep in mind that some of these may have changed since the plan first leaked.

Taken as a whole, the content industry is clearly tiptoeing towards the idea of streaming content, but altogether terrified of losing control of the streaming process. Exactly how popular this feature is will depend entirely on how easy it is to use. In the past, many of the methods the studios have backed for distributing their own content, like UltraViolet, have been decried as decidedly consumer unfriendly and inferior to other solutions.

Will current-generation consoles support UHD Blu-ray?

The question of console support is going to be important to UHD Blu-ray’s long-term uptake. But right now the picture is murky: Neither Sony or Microsoft have publicly stated that their respective consoles would support the new standard. Based on what we know about the hardware, however, I’d say they probably won’t — at least, not with the PS4’s and Xbox One’s you can buy today.

The hardware itself isn’t really the problem. Even the Xbox 360 and PS3 could likely handle H.265 decoding with proper software optimization, and the eight-core Jaguar CPUs in both modern consoles are robust enough to do the job. The problem is the discs themselves. The multi-layer discs that UHD relies on likely aren’t compatible with the Blu-ray players in either machine.

Assuming that’s true, it’s the kind of feature both companies could add when they inevitably overhaul their platforms for a new process node and lower power consumption. It might even be possible to add H.265 decode support to the GPU hardware with AMD’s help. Neither company has announced plans to roll out a new console variant as yet, but we’d be surprised if there weren’t second-generation Xbox One’s and PlayStations on store shelves by Christmas, 2016. Conventional player hardware should be available at retail within the next few months, given that Panasonic already demonstrated its prototype player at CES 2015.

Now read: 4K vs. UHD: What’s the difference?