Why are most TV sports/news/events streamed at 720/1080p when the technology is there and most people have 4k tvs?
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Why do you think most people have 4k TVs?
Most TV stations, cable networks, cable companies and such have massive infrastructure setup for 720p or 1080i that were setup in the late 90s to early 2000s. These systems continue to get upgrades but generally there isn’t any business, practical, or consumer demand for upgrading them to 4K and the massive costs and downsides associated with it for offer little if any practical benefit outside of marketing.
The transition to 4K is much much more bandwidth and cost intensive. Like way more. Which means you have to make a lot of sacrifices and take down some content in order to fit a fewer amount of 4K stuff into what was a lot of space for HD stuff. A similar thing happened in the SD->HD transition but HD was so wildly better it was worth it
4K isn’t much better than HD. It only really matters if a lot of items all are true and align which generally doesn’t happen. You need it to be filmed in very very high quality 4K HDR 60 frames per second. It must be HDR (hdr is more important than the 4K), your bitrate must be be very high (a lot of 4K you see is bullshit 4K at lower bitrates that aren’t better than HD), your compression must be fast and good and available on all devices (way easier said than done, most at home set top boxes are still being phased into these encodings and lots of backend stuff isn’t setup for it), and you need a big enough screen (usually 55”+) at the right viewing distance. If any one of those isn’t happening, the practical benefit of 4K is very low. Not zero. But so low as to not bother.
From a practical standpoint 4K is a great marketing term. But consumers are mislead. We should be bitching why stuff isn’t HDR instead of 4K. HDR is way more important
Geeze, I feel so behind the times now….. Maybe I should go buy a 4k TV…..
But just on the face of it, a 4k TV requires 4 times as much data to be sent per second as 1080p. What this means is that you can send 4 channels of TV at 1080p in the same slice of bandwidth as 1 4k channel….
That could be why.
> most people have 4k tvs
Citation needed.
As for the answer to your question, just because a higher technology is available, doesn’t mean it makes sense to use it. For example if it costs more to produce in 4k, the tv channel company will only do it if it thinks it can make enough money off the show.
Most people do not have 4K TVs. Steam’s hardware survey shows that 2/3 of all people are still using 1080p screens. While that’s obviously about what PC gamers are gaming on, I see no reason to assume television ownership will be massively different.
Sure, they have 4k tvs. But do they have 4k terminals of some kind?
For example, do most people have a 4k cable package and device? Do most people have ps5s, ps4 pro, or roku4k? Or a computer strong enough to handle 4k without lagging.
Heck, do most people buy a 4k tv because they really want 4k, or just because it’s becoming ubiquitous for the tv market?
As other mentionned, streaming anything in 4k is much more expensive on the cable provider’s/streaming site’s/producer’s end, so you need a strong consumer demand beyond even just having a 4k capable tv before they upgrade everything.
Most people don’t really have good enough eyesight to see the difference between 4K and 1080p. You have to have a really big TV and sit really close to distinguish between the two.
But while upgrading to a 4K TV might be fairly cheap, upgrading to *broadcast* in 4K is extremely expensive. And people haven’t complained, so most TV stations see no reason to spend a giant amount of money upgrading when most of their viewers can’t even see the difference.
There are still channels broadcasting in SD ..lol..💩
When they introduce 4k across all channels on their packages, you can guarantee the cost will go up .. and that will deny some people access to Tv ..
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