The First 8K TV Broadcast Has Officially Taken Place
On Dec. 1, Japanese TV networks began publicly broadcasting in both 4K and 8K. The Japanese broadcaster NHK is behind the world first, and it led with a classic bit of film — a newly restored 70mm version of 2001: A Space Odyssey designed specifically for this broadcast.
Of course, actually seeing anything in 8K these days is anything but easy. Picking up the signal required a special receiver and antenna, and carrying data from the receiver to the TV requires a whopping four HDMI cables since no one is shipping HDMI 2.1 compatible hardware just yet. Until compatible displays arrive, jamming 8K into HDMI 2.0 is going to require a lot of cabling. NHK combines the 7680×4320 resolution with 22.2 surround-sound audio support, just in case you have a small mountain of speakers and a full-sized dedicated movie room to configure them in.
Japan is pushing hard to have 8K up and running for the 2020 Olympics, but the impact of the new resolution on the wider market is likely to be small, at least for now. 8K is an enormous resolution — 33.2MP, 16x higher than 1080p and 4x higher than 4K. But the problem for 8K is the same as the problem for 4K, only magnified. The higher you push display resolution, the larger a screen you need to really show the benefit of stepping up.
The other factor pushing against the adoption of 8K is the fact that 4K is barely off the ground. There are 4K broadcasts, typically reserved for sports and movies, but general broadcast TV is still using 1080p. H.265 has been developed to improve bandwidth utilization and data compression, but the benefits of that standard are sufficient to reduce the increased bandwidth consumption of 4K streaming relative to 1080p. Any attempt to quadruple resolution above 4K levels will send data requirements soaring again, until the eventual adoption of a new compression method capable of handling them. Yes, H.265 can handle 8K (just as H.264 can handle 4K), but improving the compression ratio will require a new approach to encoding, analogous to the improvements made from H.264 to H.265. With H.265 adoption still low, the chances of a brand-new codec effort delivering an 8K format standard in the near future are small indeed.
Regardless, pulling off the first 8K broadcast is a major step for NHK. Just don’t expect it to lead to a sea change in display technology any time soon.
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