Chris Kenny
Well-known member
Will the technology be there for 4K home theater at a reasonable price in 10 years? Sure, almost certainly. But these things are rarely held up by the limits of technology.
In the IT world this stuff is simple. Hardware vendors release faster hardware every year. Computers can be given new capabilities simply by installing new software. There's always an incentive to buy new hardware, because it will make existing software better. And as hardware gets faster, it opens up the possibility of software that does new things. This flexibility allows things to move extremely fast in the IT world.
In the consumer electronics world, things aren't nearly that flexible. Most equipment in purpose-built to perform specific tasks, like playing back discs in a specific movie format. While there have been some exceptions (upgrading a progressive scan DVD player, for instance), in general, buying a new player is useless unless a new content format comes along. In other words, in contrast with the IT industry, where there's continuous upgrading, in the consumer electronics industry, upgrading happens in cycles, with new content formats (analogous to software) in lock-step with new players and new displays. And let's not even mix broadcast into this, where the government starts getting involved in terms of spectrum reallocation for new formats, and TV studios are looking at replacing millions of dollars worth of equipment, etc.
This whole lock-step upgrade cycle system is detrimental for a number of reasons. For one thing, the cycles are fairly long. People don't want to have to worry about compatibility issues in their living rooms, so a lengthy standardization process must occur. Since much of your functionality is implemented in hardware (and even if it's in firmware, most people will never upgrade), you have to test products much more thoroughly, because you can't easily fix bugs later.
And the lock-step relationship between hardware and content creates chicken-and-egg problems, where nobody wants to buy hardware if there's no content, and nobody wants to produce content if the hardware isn't widely deployed.
By the time you're done working these issues out, and serious adoption starts, you're probably already eight years in, and your format has only been on the market for five years, and most people didn't buy into it until last year....
Eight years, of course, is a very long time by tech industry standards, so by now your format is looking pretty long in the tooth from a technical standpoint, but if you start immediately working on a new one, that's going to take 2-3 years or longer to get to market (now your format is 10-11 years old), and then adoption has to begin all over again, and the previous format is getting really cheap, so more people are buying into it now than ever, and anyway they've already got really big movie collections in that format and don't see why they should buy everything twice, etc.
I basically just described DVD here, except it was worse with DVD. The draft specification was finalized in 1996, and it took until 2003 for DVD rentals to surpass VHS rentals. And DVD didn't even require people to buy new TVs!
What could change all of this is if the consumer electronics industry becomes a lot more like the IT industry. Vendors could put powerful set-top boxes in people's living rooms that could pull content off the Internet (no need to bother with new disk formats, broadcasting equipment, etc.) and download whatever software they need to play it, and store it on hard drives. Content providers could release higher quality stuff without much risk -- if you finished in 4K, you could offer a 4K version of your content alongside an HD version practically for free, without having to press and distribute lots of discs. This would put pressure on television providers to regularly upgrade resolution. You'd have something much more like the flexible, decoupled, low-risk incremental upgrading we see in the computer industry.
This might happen... but frankly I'm not holding my breath.
(Notably, one of the reasons digital cinematography cameras are progressing so much faster than prosumer cameras is that they largely ignore established industry standards; they're giving us what the technology is capable of instead. This isn't a problem for pros, because the data-centric workflow allows them to produce whatever output they need in post, but typical consumers just want to shoot in a format that plays natively on their TV.)
In the IT world this stuff is simple. Hardware vendors release faster hardware every year. Computers can be given new capabilities simply by installing new software. There's always an incentive to buy new hardware, because it will make existing software better. And as hardware gets faster, it opens up the possibility of software that does new things. This flexibility allows things to move extremely fast in the IT world.
In the consumer electronics world, things aren't nearly that flexible. Most equipment in purpose-built to perform specific tasks, like playing back discs in a specific movie format. While there have been some exceptions (upgrading a progressive scan DVD player, for instance), in general, buying a new player is useless unless a new content format comes along. In other words, in contrast with the IT industry, where there's continuous upgrading, in the consumer electronics industry, upgrading happens in cycles, with new content formats (analogous to software) in lock-step with new players and new displays. And let's not even mix broadcast into this, where the government starts getting involved in terms of spectrum reallocation for new formats, and TV studios are looking at replacing millions of dollars worth of equipment, etc.
This whole lock-step upgrade cycle system is detrimental for a number of reasons. For one thing, the cycles are fairly long. People don't want to have to worry about compatibility issues in their living rooms, so a lengthy standardization process must occur. Since much of your functionality is implemented in hardware (and even if it's in firmware, most people will never upgrade), you have to test products much more thoroughly, because you can't easily fix bugs later.
And the lock-step relationship between hardware and content creates chicken-and-egg problems, where nobody wants to buy hardware if there's no content, and nobody wants to produce content if the hardware isn't widely deployed.
By the time you're done working these issues out, and serious adoption starts, you're probably already eight years in, and your format has only been on the market for five years, and most people didn't buy into it until last year....
Eight years, of course, is a very long time by tech industry standards, so by now your format is looking pretty long in the tooth from a technical standpoint, but if you start immediately working on a new one, that's going to take 2-3 years or longer to get to market (now your format is 10-11 years old), and then adoption has to begin all over again, and the previous format is getting really cheap, so more people are buying into it now than ever, and anyway they've already got really big movie collections in that format and don't see why they should buy everything twice, etc.
I basically just described DVD here, except it was worse with DVD. The draft specification was finalized in 1996, and it took until 2003 for DVD rentals to surpass VHS rentals. And DVD didn't even require people to buy new TVs!
What could change all of this is if the consumer electronics industry becomes a lot more like the IT industry. Vendors could put powerful set-top boxes in people's living rooms that could pull content off the Internet (no need to bother with new disk formats, broadcasting equipment, etc.) and download whatever software they need to play it, and store it on hard drives. Content providers could release higher quality stuff without much risk -- if you finished in 4K, you could offer a 4K version of your content alongside an HD version practically for free, without having to press and distribute lots of discs. This would put pressure on television providers to regularly upgrade resolution. You'd have something much more like the flexible, decoupled, low-risk incremental upgrading we see in the computer industry.
This might happen... but frankly I'm not holding my breath.
(Notably, one of the reasons digital cinematography cameras are progressing so much faster than prosumer cameras is that they largely ignore established industry standards; they're giving us what the technology is capable of instead. This isn't a problem for pros, because the data-centric workflow allows them to produce whatever output they need in post, but typical consumers just want to shoot in a format that plays natively on their TV.)
