This is continued from HERE: https://www.first-loves.com/forums/view ... 354#p89354
And my new blah blah blah starts here:
This is true, although I do not particularly expect different media companies to cooperate much more than governments do. After all, is there any monetary benefit for a Japanese or German TV station to have its broadcasts compatible with other countries? When ... err ... people are just going to take it for free and p2p it?deadman wrote:It's really media companies, not governments, who establish the standards. 4K blu-ray finally dropped the region coding system.
I am sure the media companies are kicking themselves for dropping the region coding, because they still only license the content for specific regions. Last year there was a popular 4k release in the UK (George Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead') that the label refused to sell to North American customers because their license prohibited it. (Somehow they managed to sell to a single small North American retailer, and multiple UK retailers would sell it worldwide.) Going the other direction, I have been reading a 4k UHD forum lately (John Woo's Van Damme-starring 'Hard Target') where some European people are in an absolute RAGE because they have purchased a United States 4k disc from a secondary retailer (not the label), it turns out to have a defect, and they are not eligible for the replacement program because the U.S. label says they are only licensed to distribute the discs in North America. Certainly the technology allows the discs to play around the world, but licensing still makes the rules.
This certainly seems to me to be the direction it OUGHT to go, but I am not familiar enough with the streaming marketplace to see if that is the actuality. I do know that Amazon, Netflix and iTunes all seem to have content limited to certain markets, and people have to play around with VPNs and proxies to get what they want. Just having an Amazon, Netflix or iTunes account in one region is not good enough. Do you know of any streaming platform that already has much of its content available internationally from one source?As more and more movies and programming migrates onto streaming platforms for foreign audiences they're actually coming to see the benefit of global releases instead of artificially trying to enforce the pre-internet system of local material for local viewers only.
I totally believe you. You seemed to suggest that 720p had the same standards in different countries, and I will believe that too. Whether 720p qualifies as "High Definition" is debatable and just a matter of definitions; 720p is 720p even if you call it "Higher Than Standard Definition". If German broadcasters WANTED to broadcast in 1080p, surely they COULD, right? No one is forbidding them from doing so? Surely they are technologically capable of doing it?I believe 4K broadcasting does have a single standard.
I wish I had the money to be one of those buyers!As for 8K - we don't even have 8K broadcasts in the US. I saw a beautiful 8K OLED TV at Best Buy last week, but there's literally nothing to watch on it higher than 4K. One of those toys for the buyer who has to have the best of the best, always, and money is no object.
I wish everyone in the U.S. had cheap 8k streaming internet!
The U.S. has lagged behind Japan in audio-video technology for decades, and there is no reason for Japan to slow down while we play catch-up. They will do their own thing as they should. If we end up using the same technology, that only means that Japanese-branded TVs made in China will continue to work and be available in the U.S., not that Japanese television broadcasts will be widely available, much as movie-geek fans like myself might want it. I still have to rely on fansubs anyway, so I may as well rely on p2p for the video content too.