Most streaming services have extremely bit-starved encodings for their 4k streams and fall far short of the quality that a proper 4k video has.
They are also doing their encode much slower than real-time so they can achieve higher compression rates.
The definition also says "originate and receive" so you need to look at both upload and download bandwidth.
4k also isn't high enough quality for many use cases like VR.
Households also contain multiple devices, so just a single video stream isn't sufficient.
I would argue that by that definition they should be setting the forward-looking threshold as sufficient to both upload and download multiple live 8k video streams simultaneously.
> The definition also says "originate and receive" so you need to look at both upload and download bandwidth.
Yes, I agree that a symmetric definition would be better. The definition we have is pretty good though. The 20Mbps of upload is enough for 4K video streaming. It would be nice to have some more head room so that more than one person in a household could stream at full resolution at the same time, but the market has already solved that problem. Every market where 100×20Mbps broadband is available also makes higher upload speeds available.
> 4k also isn't high enough quality for many use cases like VR.
This is not a good argument. VR relies on local rendering of 3D assets, not streaming video.
> Households also contain multiple devices, so just a single video stream isn't sufficient.
100Mbps has headroom for, let me calculate here, 100/16=6 whole 4K video streams. If your whole family needs more than six simultaneous 4K video streams to live then your family has problems.
> …sufficient to both upload and download multiple live 8k video streams simultaneously.
This is just dumb. 99% of computers can’t even play 8K video; they need specialized hardware just to decode 4K video in real time and the hardware cannot handle 8K video. The cameras for it don’t exist, and neither do the displays. And finally, the FCC definition of broadband is about raising the bandwidth floor, not raising the ceiling. The ceiling is already high enough by far; I can get 50Gbps service at my house if I wanted to pay for it.
But also 8K video would still use less than 100Mbps of bandwidth!
They are also doing their encode much slower than real-time so they can achieve higher compression rates.
The definition also says "originate and receive" so you need to look at both upload and download bandwidth.
4k also isn't high enough quality for many use cases like VR.
Households also contain multiple devices, so just a single video stream isn't sufficient.
I would argue that by that definition they should be setting the forward-looking threshold as sufficient to both upload and download multiple live 8k video streams simultaneously.