Amnesia's hit the nail on the head - it's about piping the image to a larger display.

720p is perfectly adequate for a phone.

Well I am watching a 1080p film on my iPhone and even the small text is readable. It is brilliant. Though I will not worry about higher resolution screens in future. The same will apply to TV screens. Once they get retina displays the only difference might be when they start 8K format films, so the entire screen can be viewed on a retina screen.

Thing is, there isn't a medium around that will currently carry an 8K format feature film at a compression rate that justifies the difference from 1080p HD. They'll have to invent yet another disk format that we'll all have to... oh, right.


Most phone CPUs now have hardware H264 decoders built into them. As far as the phone is concerned, there's pretty much no difference between decoding 720p and 1080p. The major difference is that the file is much bigger in the latter case. And it takes more bandwidth to stream presuming you're 'throwing' it at the TV using something like Airplay.

Jon

I think that the solution will be downloading or streaming. End of disks.

Err... an 8K feature film is likely to be something over 30GB. Good luck downloading that in any reasonable timescale, even on decent broadband. To stream it you'll be chomping through roughly 17GB/hour, so equally good luck with whatever acceptable use policy your ISP has felt like imposing. You might get to watch two films a month before they throttle you to high heaven.

8K is a pipedream. There are 'concept car' screens you can pay an eye-watering price for but as it stands there is no domestic delivery system for them that's practical. Dual-layer blu-rays are a possibility but they're expensive to press right now and no-one is going to tolerate going back to paying 25 quid for a film and not all blu-ray players can play them anyway.

8K is 3D all over again. A technology only a small percentage of the market wants but which TV manufacturers are desperate to convince people will be 'the next big thing' in the hope of getting people to shell out for new TVs all over again. Most people don't even have content that makes the best of the 1080p sets they've bought yet.

Well it might make ISP's reconsider their data caps. Fortunately I am with an ISP without a cap or fair usage policy but many have caps as low as 10Gb per month so that is not even one 8k film a month.

8k is as you say a solution looking for a purpose. As for people wanting to start 8k collections when most are happy with DVD and many have not started to replace them with blu rays yet. In some respects the thought of 8k has slowed my uptake of blu ray. I do not want to be stuck with a dead format.

I stream almost everything these days - films, TV, even games. No data cap here, but there is a fair usage policy. Traffic shaping really sticks in my craw when you're doing something perfectly legal (ie. not torrenting).

That said, I could really do with upgrading my 10mbps connection, I'm tempted to go to 50mbps (I'd love to go to 100mbps, put the price is a bit steep).

Streaming Tv via something like the TVCatchup app is great for the iPad and will probably be handy on the iPad mini. With a retina display even 1080p films will look good. Streaming radio is less beneficial. Though it will make a difference with the game apps.