Getting 4K In The Home Will Be Slow Process

NewTek CTO Andrew Cross says don't expect to be watching sports at home in 4K in the near future. Over-the-air is out for now and it could be a decade or more before there is sufficient bandwidth to deliver 4K via the Internet, he says.

By Phil Kurz | April 9, 2014 | 3:42 p.m. ET.

Watching 4K sports on the latest Ultra-HD television in the home will happen for viewers — but not anytime soon.

That’s the message Andrew Cross, chief technology officer at NewTek, offered April 8 during his presentation at the NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference in Las Vegas.

Joined on stage by Mark Stross, chief technology officer at ANC Sports, Cross delivered the bad news about 4K to a meeting room filled with conference attendees eager to hear the presentation entitled “4K: A Strategic Approach.”

Cross identified three delivery paths — over-the-air, a wire and disk — as possibilities, but given the regulatory issues involved in adopting a new broadcast standard that can handle 4K, and the fact that fans want to see games now, not weeks after the fact when a disk would become available, the best alternative for the near term is the wire, he said.

Cross pointed to the bit rates identified by Netflix for over-the-top delivery of everything from SD to 2,160p 30 fps 4K. The Netflix figures reveal that on the low end of the spectrum, SD requires a mere 3 Mb/s of bandwidth, but on the high end, 4K will need a minimum of 15 Mb/s, and many “people in the know” say the figure will really be more like 40 Mb/s, said Cross.

The problem is that since 2009, Internet service providers, ISPs, have been able to achieve linear growth only in the bandwidth deployment, he said. That means it could be a decade or more before there is sufficient bandwidth to deliver 4K via the Internet, he said.

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Cross acknowledged that consumers can subscribe to premium tier Internet connectivity today, giving them the capacity to receive 4K over the top, but only if they do so in small numbers.

Stross added that if one-third of Internet subscribers purchased premium bandwidth plans, Internet service would grind to a halt for the other two-thirds of their customers.

Speaking after the presentation, Cross identified future relevancy as another danger to 4K Internet delivery to the home. “By the time the bandwidth is actually available, there may be another cool technology that’s captured the interest of consumers —like the Oculus virtual reality system,” he said.