Demand for 8K TVs Is Already Falling

You can go out right now and purchase an 8K TV, but you’ll pay quite a premium for being on the bleeding edge. You’re probably not going to do that, and most other people aren’t, either. Market research firm Omdia reports that interest in 8K TVs has fallen, and it is expected to continue sliding. The main driver, as you can imagine, is there’s just nothing to watch in 8K. You can only watch the Olympics opening ceremony so many times.

Omdia reports that ongoing consumer skepticism of 8K has hurt adoption. The firm says that 8K accounted for just 0.15 percent of all TV shipments in 2021, or about 350,000 total units. Samsung shipped 65 percent of those TVs, but its 8K shipments actually decreased by 18 percent year-over-year. With the new sluggish growth, Omdia believes the total number of 8K households worldwide will reach 2.7 million by the end of 2026. Previously, the same firm projected that 8K would be in 9 million homes by that time.

We’ve reached a point where 4K TVs are essentially a commodity — you can pick up a reasonably sized new 4K set for well under a thousand dollars. Even the cheapest 8K models are several times more expensive. And for what? There is almost no 8K content available outside of Japan (which has a single 8K broadcast channel), and consumers in that country don’t seem any more incentivized to purchase an 8K set.

Omdia also notes that it has seen no market demand for 8K content development. Streaming has long since overtaken physical media and broadcast, and 8K has little impact there. Services like Netflix and Hulu already struggle to stream 4K content at acceptable quality — these videos are often heavily compressed to save on bandwidth. There’s simply no appetite to add 8K at this time, which features 7680 x 4320 pixels — four times as many as 4K and 16 times more than 1080p.

The move to 8K may be premature given the developments in 4K sets. For example, OLED panels are finally coming down in price, offering higher brightness and more accurate HDR. The latest 4K TVs also support technologies like variable refresh rates and low-latency mode for gaming. It’s easy to see why consumers are uninterested. Instead of continuing to push resolution, manufacturers have pivoted — at least for now — towards emphasizing a wider range of image quality improvements beyond just resolution.

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