What They Say
DTV Europe reported that at NAB in a session on UltraHD, Omdia had forecast that growth in 8K adoption would slow down. It is forecasting 2.7 million homes in the installed base by 2026. The firm believes that even in Japan, which has an 8K service, there will be just 75K households by then. The firm sees the key reason as the lack of native content.
Omdia has also reduced its overall forecast by 3.7 million in 2022 because of the war in Ukraine and weak demand in China. The firm believes that the impact is very strong in Eastern Europe and UltraHD set sales will not get back to 2021 levels until 2025.
What We Think
As Paul Gray said last week in the Eutelsat webinar, he, broadly, thinks 4K is ‘good enough’ and that 8K needs new applications. The DTVE article surprisingly said that Samsung was not promoting 8K but changing to promote QD-OLED. Given that its big 2022 press push recently was almost exclusively about 8K, it’s understand where this comment comes from. Apart from anything else, QD-OLED is going to be very limited in supply for several years. Much does depend on Samsung (which has currently around 2/3 of the market for 8K) and whether it can get 8K LCD panels of good quality at reasonable prices.
I’m not so sure the lack of content at 8K is as big a disadvantage as it used to be now that upscaling is so good. (BR)
