No huge problems

Fundamentally I do not believe there are huge problems with today's TVs themselves, if you look at the entry level and middle-market end of the scale, where the majority of units are being sold.



Since the digital transition during 2008-2009 as consumer have enjoyed a very high level of content quality overall compared to what existed before, and I do not think most most of us would choose to go back to analog SD.



Now that being said, we are severely under-utilizing the capabilities of the current installed base of HDTVs. All of this has to do with the fact that to get the majority of that content distributed, we have to leverage the limitations of the existing broadband Internet infrastructure that is lagging far behind the capabilities of our content playback devices.



Very few people have been using the 1080p capabilities of their TV sets and set-tops because their content suppliers restrict much of this to pay-per-view on-demand, and to really take advantage of quality 1080p content you have to use Blu-Ray discs because nothing is over-the-air broadcast in this resolution.



Many households still do not have Blu-Ray players, nor is it as convenient a medium as Internet streaming.



To complicate this further, Internet-distributed 1080p and even 720p content has to be heavily compressed in order to be pushed by On-Demand services such as Netflix, Amazon Video and Apple TV, so the amount of visible artifacts during playback is significant and is qualitatively not comparable to Blu-Ray discs.



Most of these problems can be attributed to the broadband connection to the last mile and network congestion when attempting to access streamed video from the content delivery networks (CDNs) that services like Netflix and Amazon use.



We will need gigabit or higher broadband to the home to make 4K content transport viable in the Internet, and obviously the electromagnetic spectrum cannot be expanded, so we are going to need to make massive improvements in digital multiplexing on existing DTV channels, freeing up existing spectrum and considerably advancing compression technology to even think about moving 4K Over the Air.



If you thought the Digital TV transition was like the government trying to move Mount Everest, think about it trying to move Olympus Mons instead for a broadcast 4K adoption. The FCC has recently called for all 50 states to provide gigabit connections to the home within five years. I say Good Luck with that.