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A couple of weeks ago in news of someone coming out with 8K resolution televisions, I left a comment to the effect that I have a 4K TV, but there's no 4K content, so an 8K TV was a bit silly. Someone said they thought Netflix had a couple of 4K offerings.
I recently ran across news that I'll have 4K content in the nebulous future. The FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] is taking its first steps toward over the air 4K broadcasts. but it appears that it may be a while before I see it.
There's more about it here at CNet. But all three articles raise questions that aren't answered, primarily, what about bandwidth? It seems to me that without extremely tight lossy compression, it would take four times the bandwidth of 1080p. Will quality be much better than 1080p after they compress the signal?
How will they get around that? Will I lose some side channels? What do you folks have to say?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 06 2017, @02:40PM
My guess would be a regulatory hack where the "main channel" becomes a highly compressed 480i to encourage people to upgrade and the "real 4K channel" gets hacked in by abuse of the regulations, its legally a non-video data carrier even though in practice people watch the superbowl on it.
The most likely outcome doesn't require new codecs or new TVs or abused FCC regulations which is just to overcompress the hell out of it and tell hollywood to work around it. I would imagine its very easy at the content creation stage to present a TV commercial (which is the content that really matters) as a high bandwidth panning zooming action flick or as a relatively low bandwidth static talking head. So technology will drive for now.
Something to keep in mind is free TV is free for people unwilling to spend money on higher bandwidth sources... it looking like crap to people who are not good advertising victims will bother the industry about as much as shipping crap audio or shipping crap writing or shipping crap plots has historically bothered hollywood execs, aka it won't bother them at all.
The marching moron end user will have a 4K on the box, 4K on the receipt, the 4K indicator LED will light up, it'll look like crap but the enduser will be happy because they spent the money and got what they wanted.
(Score: 2) by tnt118 on Monday February 06 2017, @10:45PM
There's a problem. Unlike the transition from analog to digital, stations are not getting a second (temporary) channel to run both simultaneously. And we're not even sure if it will be possible -- let alone practical -- to run both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 at the same time. I'd wager that may never happen. It's entirely possible the "best" way to get through this is for stations to cooperate.
Station 1 converts to ATSC 3.0 and carries the signal for both station 1 and station 2. Station 2 remains on ATSC 1.0 and adds station 1 to its signal. There wouldn't be room for any of the original subchannels without significant cutbacks to the bitrates. Eventually station 2 converts when everyone is ready to drop ATSC 1.0.
There are going to be some pain points on this one, we just don't know exactly what they are yet.
I think I like it here.