Our Industry Is Changing (4K and 4K+ coming to homes and devices)

[Phil Holland]

To that point Blair it is all about "doing it right" or at least doing it pretty well.

If we're talking cinema level viewing experience the bitrates to support that DCI level bitrate we need to hit that 31.25MB/s DCI 4K 12-bit spec. We're just getting there shortly with premium internet to deliver anything like that with overprovisioning.

That said, the UHD 4K (and even 8K) that Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube provide is not terrible. In fact that's the best streaming high resolution content the masses have access to at the moment. But that of course requires hardware and an internet connection to support the bandwidth. Oddly I'm sadly unimpressed by some aspects of UHD Blu-Ray at the moment, visuals are good, but the general disc playing experience has been largely overlooked somehow. Especially in the face of modern content browsing experiences. Don't know why it went this particular way.

The exceeding point of all of this is not a war on resolution, but when is enough enough for each individual consumer. There's going to be a different answer for a lot of people, especially once we get beyond 8K in home, but 4K and 8K are pretty clearly the trend moving forward for in home and *god I hope we do it right and more often in cinema* 8K.

Resolution is not the end all and be all, but it is part of the recipe that leads to a quality viewing experience.

Around 3rd/4th quarter of this year when the 8K displays hit places you can actually buy them you'll be able to do a nice little eye test between two 85" inch models hopefully side by side of 4K and 8K. I just got to do this the first time in January in anything close to the same size screen, so I have my answer. I also oddly have my answer in a 30" screen.

As of right now there's value to DCI screens in as small as a 15.3" diagonal display (13.9" for UHD 8K) - approximate btw, but initially we'll be seeing the big screens to showcase UHD 8K as they show it rather dramatically well.

 

[Lee Saxon]

I heard that line before , regarding 3D - didn't went too well, to say the least (and yeah, I told everybody so back than)

Yeah but 3D was a prediction of a shift in a different direction - a direction which was garbage.

You can't compare the prediction "televisions are going to keep increasing in resolution just like they have been for ~2.5 decades" to that at all. That's barely even a prediction.

 

[Phil Holland]

While eating dinner it was fun to see the commentators who got to experience some of the Winter Games in Pyeongchange in 8K HDR. That was on live broadcast today.

Related to that:
https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/31/pyeongchang-will-host-first-major-5g-video-demonstrations-for-olympics-viewers/

Interesting to note from that article is NBC has access to downsampled 4K HDR footage from what NHK is filming over there. The "NHK is expected to roll out satellite 8K video feeds in 2020" is something to pay attention to, and not just for 2020, but a bit sooner.

Also to note, while it's rather unclear how 5G will manifest in it's early mobile releases (though we know what most current processors top out at support-wise) some of the most recent demonstrations from the Super Bowl on have exceeded 2Gbps. I do strongly feel it will launch in the mobile world at 1Gbps and navigate from there as new hardware is released. Shorter range routers, like for home and office, have been demonstrated most recently in the 4-5Gbps.

Bare in mind I'm talking wireless mobile connections here. As of last year in the US our average broadband connection is 70.75Mbps.

At this moment I am very much wondering what any sort of broadband hard line connection will be doing to compete against this. Beyond 1Tbps has been achieved via fiber optics some time ago, but is commercially offered to consumers sort of nowhere.

I think we're about to see a real speed war in the world of hard line and wireless that we haven't experienced before as consumers or professionals. The side effects of this of course mean things like 8K become rather trivial to stream data rate-wise.

This of course won't happen overnight, but the marketing will be intense and the benefits of the higher speed connections will be impossible to ignore for anybody who uses the internet. The bigger question will be is how much this will cost us as consumers and will we have data caps. I'm certain some plans will, but unlimited for a moderate premium anywhere in contention with current top tier mobile pricing, heck with $50 added on top would kill any landline competition.

There's a lot going on industry-wide right now with announcements and hints at certain directions, but for us and those who hopefully produce content with the gear we're using here I do sincerely hope you're paying attention to all of this. Some other stuff I've been tracking and have mentioned in the past, PCI-E 4.0 drops Q3 with 5.0 oddly not too long after. We already sort of know what's going on with memory at this point speed-wise and that can't be a shocker to anybody at this point.