OTA TV Broadcasting In 4K...When?

Watched the 8K demo at NAB, and it had noisy blacks, shaky camerawork, and the whites were clipped (the video equivalent of overcompression). Ugly pictures. Ultra-high-res does no good if it's ugly.

 

But hey, it was 8K resolution!

 

Funny...I started this thread back in Feb. Just saw that Netflix is now streaming in 4K. You need a 5gb router. A friend of mind just got a 4K set, and set up the Netflix streaming and he says its fantastic, best thing hes ever seen.
I heard that Comcast is going to offer 4K cable as well, you just need their new 4K cable box.

So....4K IS starting to take over. How they will do it OTA remains to be seen, but you can bet they will.

 

Not to rain on any parades, but I have seen demos of it, and seriously it is not really much different than the best 1080P demo material.

In reality you are never really getting the real 4k picture, cause it is compressed a great deal.

I like the "Idea" of it, but the reality is, they end up butchering the signal in "other ways", to get this 4k signal.

Not many things can really output a TRUE 4K signal that has no compression.

Anything cable, netflix, or sat, heck even over the air, all compress the signal, and at best when everything is just right, it will be a better signal for sure. Problem is, as the program content changes, pans, has movement etc, the resolution is very altered.

A nice idea, but not truly practical in most regards.

I wish it was really. But just can not imagine how uncompressed, or relatively uncompressed signal will be sent.

 

It is not "starting to take over" anything just yet. We are still in the beginning stages and nothing is guaranteed. In order for it to be a success the masses have to start embracing and adopting it (i.e. be willing to pay for new 4K TVs and added costs such as bandwidth required for 4K content) first. Television stations have budgets and will not blindly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for new cameras and hardware on a new format that may not even properly utilize the bandwidth they have available let alone see mass adoption. It took a long time for HDTV to fully take off and see proper implementation, and we are nowhere near that point with 4K.

 

Kevin is 100% correct. If you compress the living crap out of a 4K signal, it survives (barely) as 4K only in terms of the vaguest definition. To me, if you step on a signal hard enough, there are so many artifacts and flaws, the added detail doesn't provide even a glimmer of improvement over a decent 1080 or 2K signal.

The reality is that most parts of North America still don't have an infrastructure fast enough to handle 4K video. Heck, even the HD we see from Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, and so on is still very heavily compressed... and 4K is theoretically 4X more demanding.

 

The BBC is doing some UHD tests over terrestrial during the World Cup but they may not be tunable using consumer equipment. There's an entire multiplex free at the moment, which is handy for this.

 

4K is fantastic for cinemas and I have no problem with that. But there just isn't enough bandwidth available for 4K to be viable as a home format. Not yet, anyway. I'm jazzed about movies shooting on 4K and having them use 4K as a digital archival format... which has been done for more than 15 years (initially with film, and later, with high-res digital cameras).

 

I'm on Google Fiber, and they sent out an application to test new technologies. With a gigabit up and down, I should have enough bandwidth for 4K should they choose to test it.

 

Yep, if everybody had Google Fiber (or the equivalent), 1GB up and down would be more than enough to enjoy decent-quality 4K with no problem.