UHD/4K has barely started taking off in the mass market and already 8K is on the horizon. 8K will go commercial in 2020, according to CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney, speaking at the Cable Congress in Brussels this week. J:COM, CableLabs’ largest member in Japan, will televise some of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in 8K.
Past experience has been that it takes two to five years after a new broadcast technology is used at an Olympics until it’s ready for the mass market. Parts of the 2012 London event were televised in 4K on an experimental/testing basis, but it was not until mid-2014 that UHD TV sets became widely available at mass market prices. 3D, 4K’s predecessor, never really took off.
It’s also unclear at this point whether 8K is a big enough improvement to make consumers with UHD TVs want to buy an 8K capable TV set.
McKinney’s statement serves to give procrastinating consumers a reason not to buy a UHD TV now. However, that does not yet matter to the cable TV companies, because none of them can broadcast in 4K.
McKinney said, “8K has some unique characteristics, because if you stand three feet away from a 16-inch 8K set, the resolution on that is almost as good as printed page. You’re north of 180, 200, 225 dots per inch.”
McKinney also downplayed consumers demand for UHD TV sets by saying that consumers were buying a UHD TV as part of their TV replacement cycle. He said consumers are not beating down the doors to buy a UHD TV.
He said that 4K’s increased resolution and deeper colors from high dynamic range were noticeable to consumers, but were not enough to get consumers to rush out and buy a UHD set.
That is not at all what we have observed. The sales numbers we have seen indicate that UHD TVs have the fastest ramp up of any TV technology. Motivated by the falling prices of UHD TVs, consumers have been buying them at a record pace. When we observe shoppers in a store, we see that they quickly see the improved resolution and want to buy one. No buyer that we have talked with has indicated any desire to return their UHD set and go back to watching on a 1080p HD set — assuming they bought a UHD set that had good upconversion technology.
Of course the main sources for native 4K content are the OTT services that directly compete against CableLabs’ members for eyeballs — Netflix, Amazon, M-Go and NanoTech’s UltraFlix — and no doubt soon Walmart’s Vudu and Apple’s iTunes. CableLabs’ members benefit from the increased use of broadband and home networking but suffer from the loss of viewers because their advertisers pay less for their declining audiences.
Meanwhile, cablecos are still struggling to broadcast full 1080p HD video on all their channels.
This first ran in Rider Research’s Online Reporter.