F1 Wants 8K Broadcasts with No Lag Because It's What the Kids Like

The lag for the people at home could be one full minute and it doesn't matter because they don't have a way to notice.

For the people at track even one second of lag is weird.

The kids have never seen 8K and will not for some time. I can see why Tata would argue for the necessity of this upgrade though.

8K content won't be common on broadcast in the US for quite some time (and likely never (see asterisk below)). Only a few leading broadcast stations in the US are recently beginning to deploy 4K (ATSC 3.0). Even on those stations the vast majority of content is still HD. 4K is usually only seen during rare special events (e.g. Superbowl, Oscars, etc). The reason is that the vast majority of broadcast content in the US is still only being generated in HD. For example, of the top 100 most watched 2023 broadcasts in the US, 97 of them were regular NFL games. The other three were the Superbowl, Oscars and a presidential debate. Those 97 broadcasts were only transmitted in HD from the stadium except for very rare, one-off "technology demonstrations." While a handful of the HD-produced games were upscaled to 4k by a few ATSC 3.0 stations, most of ATSC 3.0 stations don't currently bother with even that.

In the US the primary TV distributor of F1 is ESPN, a channel distributed by cable, satellite and telecom companies. The vast majority of these non-broadcast distributors still only rarely transmit content in 4k, aside from some pay-per-view or subscription content. This is primarily for economic reasons due to most of their mass distribution networks still being constrained by shared pipe bandwidth. While there are exceptions to this in a handful of limited geographic areas with fiber or hybrid distribution networks, it remains true for the vast majority of US viewers - and still will for many years. Another reason is that most of the TV channels distributed in the US are still supplied in HD, except for special events in 4k. Most US consumers still only see 4K via over-the-top streaming services like Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, etc or UHD Blu-Ray discs.

As a regular viewer of F1 content, I think F1 has been one of the most "quality-forward" producers of widely distributed live content in the world. The amount of innovation and sheer effort they expend is extremely impressive, ranging from multiple cameras on-board each car, to capturing and distributing tons of real-time metadata. As a video-centric technologist I'm in awe of even the logistics required to simultaneously transmit wide-band live video feeds from 20 cars traveling at 200mph over large urban areas saturated with RF noise and occluded by myriad buildings. Doing this weekly in 24 locations across over a dozen different countries around the world, most with inconsistently varying RF frequency regulatory domains is mind-boggling.

* The reason 8k TV content will likely never be common for couch-centric, living-room viewing in most homes has little to do with technology and much to do with 1) Content distribution economics, and 2) Human Factors.

1) The majority of mass distributed video content for home couch-centric viewing is likely to remain primarily via bandwidth constrained pipes, whether through the air or over-ground. While the bandwidth of some of these pipes will expand greatly in the future it will still be constrained and as long as it is, it will remain more profitable to jam more channels down that pipe than devote more bandwidth per channel beyond some baseline perceived quality point. This is why most of the HD content on Comcast (the largest US cable company) is over-compressed into a peggish mess at the bare edge of tolerance for their average customer (certainly not for me because I find it awful). Whether this content was created in 2k, 4k or 8k and regardless of whether it gets decompressed in my house into a 2k, 4k or 8k frame buffer doesn't much matter as long as distribution economics dictates the signal itself gets stomped into mush by revenue maximizing accountants. In contexts where perceived TV quality is already severely gated by compression ratio, resolution by pixel count beyond 4k is simply a theoretical spec that is irrelevant in practice.

2) Even if the economic constraints driving over-compression were somehow removed, human factors dictate that 8k resolution offers no perceivable quality gain over 4k:

* For the majority of living room couch-centric shared video viewing scenarios.

* For the majority of consumer dwellings which only permit convenient screen sizes between ~55 - ~95 inches.

* For the majority of TV-like, mass distributed, passive video content such as sports, news, episodic shows and movies (this excludes interactive content like game consoles, web browsing, PC applications, etc).

In those scenarios, based on the typical range of screen sizes, typical range of viewing distances, typical passive entertainment content types, and typical human visual acuity, the pixels-per-degree of 4k and 8k both substantially exceed the threshold for an average human to perceive a meaningful difference. I realize the prior statement is likely to stir controversy because many of us have personally observed a noticeable difference between 2k and 4k TV. While that difference we perceived was quite real, it was due to the increased bandwidth (and corresponding gentler compression) usually given to 4k content over 2k content. If regular HD passive video content (2k) were given the same increased bandwidth/gentle compression as 4k - it would also look equally better (on a 65-inch TV, at 8-feet, etc). Both biological theory and rigorous controlled testing have repeatedly confirmed this.

This is why I contend that "8k doesn't matter vs 4k" for living room couch viewing of passive video content by most people in most homes. It certainly DOES matter for other things including interactive gaming, web browsing and PC application content. But most consumers rarely do those things on their living room TV. 8K CAN matter for typical desktop viewing distances of 24 inches and eventually for head-mounted display viewing distances of 1-inch (because the degrees per pixel are different). 8K definitely matters for content acquisition, production and archiving. F1 (and all high-value content creators) should certainly be acquiring and storing at 8k or higher for potential future use in those other contexts. All the foregoing only applies to consumer mass distribution, not of all content, but of the majority of TV content to the majority of home consumers. And I contend those majorities will keep driving the trade-offs that make the difference in pixel count between 4k and 8k continue to not be relevant in the foreseeable future. So... most Costco consumers should stop paying more just for increased pixels above 4k for living room wall-mounted TVs. It's a waste of money and sends the wrong 'signal' to the entire content ecosystem. Instead, encourage typical TV consumers (probably not you, but your friends and families) to demand more bandwidth per channel not ever more pixels per frame buffer.