The 8K Association has a new member, but do we really need the extra pixels?

Kaleidescape, a company that specializes in offering access to high-fidelity

film content
, has just joined the official 8K Association. With industry giants like Samsung, Panasonic, Google, Intel, and others already serving as active participants in the not-for-profit tech organization, Kaleidescape’s logo is now featured prominently within the Associate Members section of the Association’s Members page.

“Joining the 8KA positions Kaleidescape alongside other industry leaders, committed to fostering a collaborative environment, and dedicated to the advancement and standardization of 8K technology,” said Tayloe Stansbury, chairman and CEO of Kaleidescape in a press release.

Currently, Kaleidescape sells a range of 4K video players under its consumer-facing Strato brand. The company’s digital storefront provides access to a collection of downloadable media, each of which comes complete with

lossless audio
and full-reference video quality. With its setup forgoing internet streaming altogether, the company boasts of support for 100 Mbps bitrates, HDR10,

Dolby Vision
,

Dolby Atmos
, Dolby TrueHD, DTS:X, and DTS-HD Master Audio audiovisual technologies.

As a newfound member of the 8K Association, it’d be reasonable to expect Kaleidescape to develop an 8K-compatible Strato movie player at some point in the future. However, there are several hurdles at play: the lack of consumer adoption of 8K displays, the lack of available 8K multimedia content, and the downright massive file sizes that’d need to be accounted for. For reference, the company’s $4,000 Strato V 4K player ships with a 960GB

Solid State Drive
(SSD) — a single 8K movie might take up anywhere from 60GB to 200GB of storage space when downloaded locally.

Does 8K resolution make any sense in the consumer space?

The 8K Association might have a new member, but it’s unclear whether 8K itself has a bright future

Pocket-lint / Samsung

It’s fair to say that, for the most part, 8K as a technology hasn’t enticed customers or set the market on fire. 8K televisions were once the talk of the town, but their adoption rates have significantly lagged behind that of 4K flat panels. Sony recently bowed out of the 8K TV market altogether, leaving Samsung and LG as the two main brands to still be duking it out.

In the optical media space, the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format is in a relative state of decay, with

LG having killed off its players
late last year. In other words, the prospect of an 8K optical disc standard being introduced is about as likely as Blockbuster re-emerging from the grave.

As for gaming, despite the

generational performance leaps
we’ve witnessed in recent years, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a mainstream AAA title running at 8K resolution on a home console. Sony’s lofty PlayStation 5 claims to the contrary never quite panned out, with the company going as far as to remove the 8K emblem from newer PS5 boxes entirely. As Pocket-lint’s Roger Fingas aptly puts it,

8K gaming isn’t worth the effort
.

The way I see it, 8K has a couple of serious issues at its core, and they’re both massive uphill battles to contend with. The first major roadblock is that 8K is stuck playing a classic game of chicken-and-egg. There’s comparatively little 8K content available out there, as film and content makers are waiting for 8K displays to reach critical mass before wholeheartedly investing in the higher-resolution standard. At the same time, there’s little in the way of affordable 8K display panels on the market, as hardware makers are holding their breath for an eventual proliferation of 8K multimedia content to first emerge.

The second issue with 8K — and this one might be even more damning — is that it’s simply inconvenient. The high cost of 8K screens, the unwieldy digital file sizes, and the large bandwidth and data requirements make 8K less palatable, and that’s to say nothing of today’s economic difficulties, or the uncertain effects of global tariffs. Unless you’re a cinephile, 4K streaming platforms are more than adequate for getting the job done — the jump to 8K is one of diminishing visual returns, and most consumers aren’t concerned with bitrates, color gamuts, and other such technical considerations, either.

The expanded resolution that 8K provides is great from a futureproofing perspective, but it’ll take ages for TV screens to average out at a physical size where the added pixels make a genuine difference. If anything, I’d argue that 8K might find its niche in the virtual reality headset and smart glasses market, instead, where screens are placed right up to your eyes and therefore need to provide maximum pixel density.

As for Kaleidescape, while its admission into the 8K Association might be a positive development in the eyes of pixel peepers the world over, I can’t see it changing the resolution status quo to any notable degree. I do appreciate the company’s dedication to high-fidelity audiovisual media content, and I’m a fan of just about every aspect of the Strato V media player aside from its eye-watering price tag.

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