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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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
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