I’ve written quite a lot about 8K TV over the years, which seems so strange for a format that’s never really taken off.
Maybe it really is the hope that kills you. The amount of effort TV brands put into showcasing an 8K future, only to slowly retreat from it and pursue other lines of picture quality. And while no one seems to have officially put the stake into 8K TV’s chest, the silence around the technology has approached deafening levels.
8K popped into my mind recently as I was going through our best buys and updating the best 8K TV page. The past few years have seen the options dwindle, and each time I look at it, it’s not to add something but likely to remove a no longer available TV and to spruce up the copy so that it reflects 8K’s current status of a technology that was a thing rather than is a thing.
With RGB tellies occupying the mind space of TV brands, I can’t help but wonder where TVs go next.
The search for the next shiny thing
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I’ve written much about how 8K arrived too soon trying to do too much without the content in place. Some out there on the Internet forums would still believe that 8K is just over the horizon, but if studios and the such wanted to make content available, they’d have done so years ago. There is an apathy rather than excitement around 8K that’s consumed it whole. Samsung was the format’s biggest cheerleader but even it has gone quiet recently.
TV brands have been searching for an answer to the next frontier in TV technology, but so far it’s been a busted flush. It started with 3D in the 2010s, a technology that no one quite seemed to figure out how to make it work for the home. This kicked off a series of ‘shiny’ new things that the industry would investigate, toil and make hard work of, and then leave it to list while pursuing other ‘shiny’ things.
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QLED started of as a premium technology for TVs priced at £2000+ and now you can get it in a TV that costs £350. You’ll see in marketing for QLED TVs that they’re brighter and more colourful than standard TVs (or something to that effect), but the problem with this is that QLED is now the standard, and there’s been no progress in the technology for years at budget price brackets.
We then had a dabble with MicroLED, but quite correctly that proved prohibitive in terms of cost and who the intended market was for. MicroLED is more B2B – at best it’s custom install for the millionaires and billionaires out there. The dream of MicroLED being able to make it into 55-inch sizes was just that – a dream.
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We’ve had fancy looking OLED TVs – LG bringing out its rollable OLED-R, but designs like this came and went leaving less a crater and more a scoop of unturned soil. Then we Mini-LED (Quantum Dot Mini LED) but that’s experience a similar trajectory as QLED. A panel technology that started life as the reserve of those who could afford riches has now reached affordable status. Samsung’s M80H is an entry-level Mini LED for £699. A few years ago and that would have cost £2000.
RGB Mini LED seemed like it could be the cure-all, but now that we’re past the launches, RGB doesn’t feel like it’s an earth-shattering development. That’s not to say that RGB TVs aren’t good – some are better than others, of course – but it’s already suffering from a lack of excitement and enthusiasm. At the end of the day, it is an LCD TV, and has the same strengths and drawbacks.
Let’s not forget OLED, which seems to be the one TV technology that’s resisting taking a dive and becoming affordable. But it suffers from a lack of competition – Sony dabble in it, Hisense and TCL disavow it, Panasonic has struggled to assert itself, and no other TV brand will touch it because of the dominance of both LG and Samsung in the sector.
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Where next?
It feels as if the TV industry has slowly exhausted its options, and at the same time, customers do not seem much enthused.
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We remain in a cost of living crisis but something has changed in the conversation around TVs. Teens and young adults care more about their phones, younger kids grow up holding tablets, and these are the coming and upcoming generations that TV brands want to ensnare.
But TVs don’t form the epicentre of home life any more – the move to streaming has released any bonds and attachment to the big screen in the living room. For the first time in its history, the IPA TouchPoints data survey revealed that for adults in the UK (aged 15+) mobile phone time overtook TV watching for the first time. When I was growing up, the TV was the window to the outside world, the only way to see massive events if you weren’t there. That’s not the case any more.
It’s not so much that the TV itself has changed – it still does the same it did sixty years ago – but everything around it has. What does the future look like for TVs? I’m not too sure but it can’t be more of the same. That’s partly the reason it is where it is now.