Monday, September 1, 2014

4k Technology and Its Infrastructure Implications

                People are always wanting bigger and better displays.  Once claimed for its beauty HD, or 720p, screen technology is all but dead.  The current standard for a quality screen, be it as small as a smart phone or as large as a 70 inch television, is 1080p.  The jump from 720p to 1080p was a moderately large jump for the technology needed to support it, but it is nowhere close to the difference between 1080p and 4k.  The question that remains is how long will it be until Ultra High Definition, or 4k plus, screens are mainstream.   The problem with this advancement in technology mainly relies on technologies that are not related to the technology to create screens with a 4k resolution.  To be adopted there needs major changes in broadcast television, video compression, storage technologies and internet speed.  Internet speed and broadcast television are still trying to catch up for 1080p technologies.
                When HD screens were being adopted for television the main transportation of media was still through older technologies such as cable.  Even with cable being one of the most popular methods to watch media in the US there has been a lack of adopting Full HD, or 1080p, broadcasting.  The best service of broadcasting HD content is through 1080i.  1080i uses the same resolution of 1080p it is lesser quality since the screen refresh rate is slower, 30Hz instead of 60Hz since only half the screen is refreshed at a time.  This leaves a huge gap for cable providers fill to be able to broadcast in 4k.  It will require new infrastructure and advancements in video compression for 4k to be mainstream in cable.  This is where new video compression codecs such as H. 265 and VP9 come into play.  H. 265 is the successor to H. 264, which was specifically designed to compress 4k video at a much lower bit rate while maintaining the same quality.  H. 265 reduces the video size around 25 to 50%, depending on the video and quality.  This improvement is useful in helping reduce the amount of data needed for 4k video, but there is still more room for improvement in these algorithms to help ease the burden for storing and streaming 4k video.
                Digitized media is the way of the future, physical media such as DVDs and Blu-Rays are dying technologies.  Digital storage and streaming is where 4k causes the biggest problems with current technologies.  A compressed 1080p movies requires around 10GB of storage while the 4k video will require 40GB.  This 4 times requirement in storage cost will make it much more expensive to store movie collections, especially on mobile devices which are already strained by 1080p videos.  Hard drive technology will have to speed up with advancements in storage capacity to continue satisfying people’s storage needs for their media.  4TB HDDs, which are the largest mainstream HDDs, only store around 100 movies or around 300 to 400 episodes, at around 30 minutes an episode, of a television series in 4k. For many people that will not be enough to contain their libraries of digital media.  The other digital form of watching media is through streaming services.  Netflix a leader in streaming require a minimum of 20 Mbps download speed to stream smoothly in 4k.  1080p only requires about 10 Mbps, which is around the average speed that US citizens have.  Even though the mean download speed across the US is 10 Mbps there is more than half of the US which use speeds which are slower than that.  Which means that the average US consumer will need to more than double their current internet speeds for them to take advantage of their 4k screen.  This leave a lot of work to be done by US internet service providers.
                For the average user it will be a few years before they will get a 4k screen and utilize it fully.  This means the cable providers are going to wait a few years before they begin to implement the technology for broadcasting television in 4k.  The technology which will push users into adopting 4k technologies will be digital media streaming and download services such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and other digital media providers.


4k Streaming Bandwidth

Average American Internet Bandwidth

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