Skyfrog: The cable and satellite providers can barely fit in their crappy overly compressed 720p broadcasts as it is.

Many cable operators in North America are still using the older H.262 (MPEG-2) compression scheme in order to remain compatible with ClearQAM tuners found in most HDTVs. In Europe, it is the same deal with DVB-C tuners.

Any deployment of UHD (3840 × 2160) television will probably come in tandem with the new H.265 (HEVC/MPEG-H) codec that is nearing final draft status. It is supposedly twice as good as H.264 (AVC/MPEG-4), which in turn is supposedly twice as good as H.262. So cable operators are going to be able to fit a comparable number of UHD channels into the same space they fit HD channels today.

The mini-sat providers might be farked, though. In both North America and Europe, many of them are using DVB-S2, which uses H.264, because they don't have as much bandwidth as the cable operators and they need the more efficient video codec. Either they are going to have to find new frequencies outside of the Ku-band channels they have now or launch more sats with spot beams.

It will also be interesting to see if UHD can be transmitted over-the-air in the Americas and Japan where we only have a 6MHz wide television channel as opposed to Europe and mainland Asia that uses 7 and 8MHz wide channels.


/ClearQAM = ATSC with QAM256 modulation

1. It can be a broadcast standard. HEVC compression, which is about twice as efficient as h.264 will allow it to squeeze into a broadcaster's channel bandwidth, but it means ditching those 'extra channels'. More likely it will allow cable, fiber, and satellite providers to run some premium channels in 4K. So don't consider it a no-show for broadcast.

2. 4K fits neatly onto the quad-layer BluRay disks that were invented six years ago. There hasn't been any need to produce them until 4K. So the media is ready to go for this resolution. The PS4 will have full 4K function - or so they keep claiming.

3. Almost every movie filmed in the last 100 years, except those shot on 70mm which are damn rare, can't be scanned at resolutions higher than 4K. There just isn't any more detail in the 35mm film stocks. That means that when you buy Star Wars or the Godfather at 4K that is the last version you will need. It won't ever get any sharper. BluRay already delivered the maximum audio clarity. 4K provides the maximum visual clarity. Do you want to keep buying BluRays, only to see them outdated with 4K or hurry up and get to 4K and enjoy the plateau?

4. This isn't the first consumer 4K display. 4K projectors have been out for a year. They ain't cheap though.

5. 4K is really for large displays. Unless you just sit super-close to your display you just aren't going to see the full detail

6. This (hot) chart tells you if 4K would actually be a benefit for you:

Fubegra: bdub77: I don't even play bluray movies anymore, the technology is so grossly awful to deal with. On my current BR player, which is pretty good compared to others I've owned, most movies take 5 minutes to load, and heaven forbid you fark up and accidentally stop it or power it down halfway in. (I've heard good things about the PS3 capabilities but it's not really worth it to me at this point.)

Ain't DRM fun? I've never even bothered with bluray, precisely because of its craptastic user-unfriendliness.

The likelihood of 4k content ever making it to OTA broadcasts or anything else that isn't hobbled with even worse DRM than bluray is pretty farking close to zero. Besides, even 1080i is pretty damn good - 4k is a solution in search of a problem unless you're talking theater-sized screens.

HDDVD loaded way faster, but then the copyright protection wasn't perceived to be as good, so it died.

/still have my toshiba a3...

What 4k will look like in the future:

wildcardjack: [imgs.xkcd.com image 389x337]

A 4k projector might be good stuff. Might be a wash with an 84" monitor, since I think they might be about the same size.

It baffles me that someone as smart as the guy that does XKCD doesn't seem understand the concept of angular resolution.

bdub77: I don't even play bluray movies anymore, the technology is so grossly awful to deal with. On my current BR player, which is pretty good compared to others I've owned, most movies take 5 minutes to load, and heaven forbid you fark up and accidentally stop it or power it down halfway in. (I've heard good things about the PS3 capabilities but it's not really worth it to me at this point.)

Ain't DRM fun? I've never even bothered with bluray, precisely because of its craptastic user-unfriendliness.

The likelihood of 4k content ever making it to OTA broadcasts or anything else that isn't hobbled with even worse DRM than bluray is pretty farking close to zero. Besides, even 1080i is pretty damn good - 4k is a solution in search of a problem unless you're talking theater-sized screens.

This is gonna end up like that whole megapixel thing we were all obsessed with 5 years ago, or the DPI thing in printers we were all obsessed with 15 years ago.