Brief History of Home Movie Watching and Why 8K Disc Will Never Happen

This is a follow-up post to my recent post on the comparison of quality between 4K Blu Ray discs and 4k streaming.

There was once a time, way back in the 2000s when physical media was extremely popular. All uncles owned at least a hundred or so DVDs and competed with the other uncles on who had the largest movie collections. Kids had to go with their parents to the grocery store to rent a movie in the small rental shop commonly found throughout the Midwest. Even one of the most dominant streamers that paved the way for the rest, Netflix, started as a physical media rental service by providing DVDs through the mail.

The Video Home System (VHS) cassette tape came to the US market in 1976 from JVC as a way to record favorite television programs – a 1970s DVR. Betamax videocassette recorders (VCR) came out the prior year from another Japanese company, Sony. Neither company was aware of it at the time, but they had created competing products and ultimately started the videotape war.

Sony went to JVC with a Betamax prototype in 1974 unaware that JVC had a competing technology only a couple of years away. When JVC showed Sony their product and refused to join Sony’s Betamax, Sony went to the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry but was denied their appeal. At the time, Betamax’s chances of beating VHS looked decent as Sony made a great number of the VCRs – and they were not making VCRs for VHS. Unfortunately, almost every other VCR company went with VHS, including the dominant VCR maker in the United States: RCA (RCA had 36% of the VCR market in 1978 compared to Sony’s 19.1%).

By January of 1981 Betamax only had about 25% of the VCR market share and consumers were warned from studios that VHS selection would be broader than Betamax. This ultimately sealed the fate of Sony’s Betamax format, although it struggled along until 1988 when it was finally discontinued in the United States.

VHS and Betamax were amazing for their time. The cassettes essentially made possible the ability to watch movies at home. Before tape, you had to physically go to a movie theater to watch a film. Today, almost all movie watching is done through streaming platforms, at home, and on the couch. Each had roughly the same exact quality with a resolution of 576x240 lines.

Lines are analogous to digital pixels or the smallest individual element of a screen, and in this case, would be similar to 240p. We currently are in the digital era, making the later media formats more comparable than the analog VHS. Lines and pixels aren’t perfect matches but check out the below scans of VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray to get an idea of how far below VHS detail really was.

For two decades, Betamax and VHS quality were okay – most of us just didn’t know better! Laserdisc had been around since 1978 with an improved horizontal resolution of 425 lines but televisions sucked anyways. But when DVDs became mainstream the poor quality of VHS became quite noticeable. TVs could go up to “standard definition” resolution of 480!

DVDs started getting popular in the late 1990s and quickly overtook VHS by 2002 as the dominant home video media of choice. Production costs of DVDs were less expensive than VHS which led publishers to phase out the cassettes. The resolution of DVD was 720x480 (480i or 480p), representing an increase in pixel density over VHS of about 40%. Color was also noticeably improved by DVD. VHS carried color over composite video which combined luminance and color difference signals into one jumbled message. DVD held pictures in component video which provided separate streams for luminance and color elements and delivered a more vibrant image.

DVDs became so popular so quickly that the format was able to compete with VHS in best-selling numbers throughout its span, although its appeal did not last long enough to compete on all-time sales. In only several years it faced competition from its successors, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Blu-Ray represented a comeback for Sony, the loser from the previous video format wars with Betamax. Blu-Ray was officially announced in 2002 after a breakthrough in disc storage capabilities through the invention of the blue laser diode by Shuji Nakamura. The DVD consortium pressed ahead with a competitor deemed HD-DVD released in the same year as Blu-Ray in 2006.

The competition in quality was close in the beginning, but Blu-Ray quickly came out ahead as HD-DVD was held back by being built on legacy hardware. Blu-Ray had greater storage, higher bitrates, and better encoding – but that had little to do with why it won out over HD-DVD. Sony played to win this format war. They decided to sell their flagship game console, the PlayStation 3, at a loss with an included Blu-Ray drive. The PS3 became one of the best-selling consoles of all time, Americans had little want of a standalone HD DVD player, and the rest was history.

Compared to DVD, Blu-Ray was a significant step and represented the beginning of the HD revolution. Now, people would complain about seeing an actor appear too “lifelike” and not pretty enough without the crappy-resolution masking defects. Blu-Ray had a resolution of 1920x1080 for an increase in pixel density of about 5.15 times the pixel density of DVD. Data bitrate transfer was also increased from 11 Mbit/s on DVD to 53.9 Mbit/s on Blu-Ray.

The picture was noticeably sharper and was able to match the resolution of consumer-grade TVs and yet consumers were, and have been since the release of Blu-Ray, avoidant of HD physical media. DVD weekly sales still today regularly outpace Blu-Ray sales, let alone its successor 4K Blu-Ray.

4K Blu-Ray is not performing well in the age of streaming relative to its peers. 4K Blu-Ray players may be the culprit here as popular videogame consoles capable of playing 4K discs are only now being released within the past year. Still, the format is the king of resolution at this point, against Blu-Ray or streaming.

4K Blu-Ray is an easy comparison to Blu-Ray: a resolution increase approximately four times greater. Improved luminance and color also arrived on 4K with the new High Dynamic Range codecs. Raw data transfer for 4K Blu-Ray reaches speeds over twice the raw bitrates of Blu-Ray and total storage is 4 times the amount found on Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray and 4K Blu-Ray never even had the same window of opportunity as DVD, which at the time had a much shorter window than VHS. Streaming and streaming services arrived and instantly began outselling all physical media formats. Check out a previous post for a comparison between streaming and 4K Blu-Ray. For now, 4K disk is still king at delivering the best picture. As internet speeds increase and improved compression codecs are invented, streaming will one day most likely surpass the image quality of 4k Blu-Ray.

And this will likely be the death of physical media.

The sales just are not there to incentivize media companies to continue to put their films on disc. 8K is the logical next format for movies to be mastered and released to the public but 8K seems destined to be a content format almost exclusively for internet streaming.  

There are already 8K televisions on the market, so there should be demand for 8K content eventually. Japanese broadcaster, NHK, is even broadcasting 200 hours of Olympics content over-the-air at 8K quality and trying to push the format, even if adoption rates are currently extremely low. The 8K Association has already stated they have no plans currently for 8K Blu-Ray, but instead plan to promote streaming compression codecs and over-the-air broadcasting at the moment.

It is not completely obvious that companies even want their media to be consumed through physical disc. Disney has been releasing subpar 4K Blu-Ray releases lately and choosing to have Dolby Vision HDR exclusive to its Disney+ streaming service. The companies with streaming services should still release their films at a markup to make money off physical media purchasers, but they have most of their attention geared towards developing their streaming offerings. Disney has already stated that only new films from here on will get the 4K Blu-Ray treatment, choosing to ignore reissuing back catalog films from their vault of movies or, after the purchase of the studio, any of Fox’s movies for that matter.

Only a tiny subset of consumers would even notice if 4K Blu-Rays stopped being sold, let alone a new 8K format. They certainly may not even be able to notice much of a difference between 4K and 8K until televisions start getting much larger in size so any push for 8K at this point seems like essentially a cash-grab marketing stunt.

In fact, double-blind studies have already been performed to measure if individuals can actually perceive a difference between 4K and 8K – they largely cannot. A large number of the participants preferred 4K content and the ones that did prefer 8K needed to be sitting close to the screen and have really good visual acuity. The investigators even went as far to say 20/10 vision may be necessary to really tell the difference, which would be unfortunate as only around 1-2% of American adults have that good of vision.

An 8K Blu-Ray could potentially store the amount of data necessary for an 8K image and using legacy hardware such as Blu-Ray should potentially help the 8K physical format. Unfortunately for physical media buffs, by the time 8K-ready televisions are in homes streaming speeds should be improved, and streaming movies may look nearly as good as on disc anyways – further hurting the argument to even bother with physical media.

The 8K format will still be a solid performance increase for movie lovers– just, not on physical media. It is important to note that most movies today are mastered in 2K, which is the dominant resolution found in digital theaters, and then upconverted to 4K in post-production. There is not a ton of 4K mastered content yet, but if you read my previous post you can see that there is still room for television pictures to get sharper and more vibrant. The move to 4K has provided some studios the opportunity to remaster their films in 4K and hopefully, the 8K streaming format will incentivize studios to remaster even more films in the new format.

Note: Check out this article for more screencaps comparing VHS to DVD and Blu-Ray.