We're all ever so happy with our HD displays these days.

How did we ever get by with analogue SD FTA TV? Even on a huge 90 cm CRT that needed two men to carry and a doctor to tend to their hernias after?

Prepare to be disgruntled with what you have, or at least incredulous at the next step. We've culled some information from an industry insider report (link at the end of this article) and some other sources which I think will open your eyes, blow your mind and find you asking questions. 

Ultra-High Definition is already being explored as a new market with suggestions that it will begin occupying reasonable market share by around 2022. The specification has for two new resolutions: 4K and 8K. 4K is 3840 x 2160 and 8K is 7680 x 4320. These are intended to be digital broadcast standards, so we're not just talking about high-density optical media delivery vectors here. 4K is presently available for commercial cinema applications.

Hold that thought for just a moment. 

Sound has been mentioned at 22.2. No, that's not a typo. Twenty-two-point-two. 22.2 3-D sound. I don't know about you, but 5.1 to 7.1 in the home is certainly very nice indeed. Some of the higher standards at better equipped, newer cinemas are definitely an improvement and sound awesome. However - 22.2 joins in that delivery vector issue mentioned above. 

 ^{Image via NHK, Japan.}

Let's look at that more closely:

Blu-Ray currently has capacities of up to 50 Gb. There are other higher density variants of that which have been proposed and other as-yet-uncommercialised products, one of which will need to come along and knock Blu-Ray off its perch. CD, DVD and USB have absolutely no place in UHD formats owing to lack of capacity. 

This means that with the 4K standard - the basic UHD standard - that there is a requirement for four times as much data. A little scary, but the 8K standard means that you're talking about sixteen times the resolution of 1080p (normal, full-HD) - sixteen times the amount of information to process. And so far - these numbers only account for the video data. 

Let's add the sound-track to this. Using Dolby Digital, a normal DVD sound track has a bitrate of about 448 Kbit/sec maximum. BluRay is 640Kbits. So far, nothing spectacular. Step this up to Dolby TrueHD for an 8 channel system and you're talking 18 Megabits maximum bitrate. With a little sloppy extrapolation, that means that the 22.2 system could mean a nominal throughput requirement of not far less than 30 Megabits.

Combined, that represents an enormous amount of bandwidth from the source (player, STB, etc) to the sink (screen and audio playback device). 

In an experiment in 2006, NHK Japan prepared a sample for transmission for a special event. Source bandwidth? 24 Gbits / second for video and 28 Mbits / sec for audio. Uncompressed, a 20 minute broadcast would require about 4 terabytes of storage. Depending on the compression used, the bitrates for the video signal would be between 180 - 600 Mbit and audio around 7 - 28 Mbit.

To put that into perspective, the BluRay specification calls for a maximum combined AV (audio and video) bitrate of 48 Mbits / second. 

In really simple terms, a fast modern PC with a good fast hard disk would be working very hard just to keep up with UHD's data needs. The final uncompressed output is about 80 Mbytes per second - or in other words enough data to fill a CD in about nine seconds - data rates more in the realm of specialised Ultra 2 Wide and Ultra 3 SCSI devices. SATA standards, the darling of the PC building industry, can't sustain those throughputs.

Naturally, there's a lot more to it than this article has covered. If you're really up for a good read about all the gritty details technically and commercially, I recommend you visit Instat for the full report, available for USD$3495.00 - yes - a proper business intelligence report. 

The result? 2022 - 2025 would seem to be the right year for consumer uptake, but without certain advances in technology and aesthetics, UHD standards will remain very much in the wholly commercial market sector.