Matt McClure: Hey everybody, welcome to Demuxed again.
I'm excited to say we have Phil finally back in the studio.
Phil Cluff: Back in the studio? I'm literally
in a different continent.
Matt: So yeah, huge thanks to Nick, obviously.
We'll have him back on because he's been fantastic.
But we're always glad to see your face,
even if it's via video screen.
Phil: I miss you, too.
Matt: So, Demuxed news. It's early in the year, obviously,
but we do officially have a location, as we've said,
and now we have dates. It's October 17th and 18th
at the Bespoke in Westfield.
And yes, you heard that correctly, that's two days.
So we'll look forward to seeing all
of your amazing submissions.
We're going to need more of them than ever
so we can make sure that we fill the schedule
and make use of all the time that we have.
Let's go ahead and dig in.
But today we have Matt Fisher from Vimeo.
Known Matt, I think, since I moved out to the Bay.
I think back then you worked at Twitch,
when we first met. But why don't you tell us
a little bit about yourself and why
you're the one to talk about 4K video today.
Matt Fisher: Yeah, well as was mentioned, my name's Matt Fisher.
I'm the Lead Video Playback Engineer at Vimeo.
I've been there for just over a year now,
I guess almost a year and a half.
And as you mentioned, I came from working at Twitch.
Why am I the guy to talk about 4K,
that's a great question.
Aside from the fact that at Vimeo
we definitely pride ourselves on high quality video,
it's something that
we try to enable
as much possibility around video delivery
and quality and good consumption
experiences for our creators.
Really understanding the current landscape
and where we're heading
is extremely important for us,
and it's something that I'm truly interested in.
Matt: I guess before we dig into 4K and 360 and VR
and all that sort of stuff, which we've talked
about very briefly on the show, or at least
one episode, right?
Yeah, light fields, which digs into VR a little bit.
But yeah, I guess let's talk a little bit
about HD's history online, or more generally,
just video quality online.
Phil: Video resolutions.
Matt: Yeah.
My favorite old-school online video example
is eBaum's World. Let's go from the beginning
of downloading DivX files from eBaum's World to today.
Yeah, let's talk about what that journey has been like.
Matt F:
I guess the real start would be,
especially when you look at it from today's perspective,
it seems so rudimentary, it seems so simplified.
But in all honesty, there's a lot of similarities
to what we do today still.
Video delivery is still relatively similar
to what it was. Maybe we took a big jump
from progressive to segmented delivery,
but at the end of the day, it's always just
constant iterations, constant upgrades.
Looking back that far, you're talking
back in the 360p, 240p days.
Steve Heffernan: Yeah, I remember.
Even in the late '90's you had Real Player.
And that was like,
1-something-p or something, but it was beautiful.
It was like videos playing in my web browser!
Matt: Wow!
Steve: Cutting-edge technology,
as Nick would say.
Phil: To be fair, your screen was probably 800 x 600.
Steve: Yeah!
Phil: Looks a lot better.
Steve: Exactly!
Matt F: I guess that's what it was, because when you go back
and look at any of that content now,
there's some great internet videos
that have stood the test of time
and you go back and look at them now
from the eBaum's World days.
You look at them now and you're wondering
how you even made out what was playing in the video
because it looks so bad.
And maybe it is just all relative to the screen size.
But at the end of the day, that wasn't too long ago, right?
Matt: No, not at all.
I wonder if that's part of the reason why,
what was the Flash site that was so popular?
- Newgrounds?
Matt: Newgrounds!
Newgrounds is what I was thinking about.
I wonder if the fact that it was just Flash cartoons
and the shittiness of the video.
It wasn't video, so it's fine. The quality looked fine.
Matt F: Well, it was all vector-based, too.
Matt: Right, exactly.
Matt F: So it scaled beautifully.
Matt: Yeah, I wonder if that has something
to do with that being more popular.
I'm going out on a limb here, but
I'm pretty sure that had more views.
Matt F: I never thought of it like that,
that's actually a great point.
Steve: You had Homestar Runner and Rascal.
Matt F: Which looked beautiful at the time, right?
Steve: Yeah!
Matt F: Especially when it was
displayed in its native vector format
through a Flash player.
Matt: Even Homestar is funny
because you go to the website now
and it's this tiny little square
at the top of your browser window.
And back then it was like, wow, this fit in my browser?
Do I have enough pixels to show this?
Even then, though,
I remember trying to watch videos on there
and those damn loader bars would take forever,
even on Homestar or whatever.
And then you start to have something like eBaum's World
and you're oftentimes either right clicking
a file and downloading it and watching it locally
or, if you're lucky, you have the browser plugin
that allows you to watch it in your actual browser.
But these things were slow.
I feel like it took a while for us to even get
to the point where we could reliably watch,
what is SD, technically?
Matt F: I would say anything
sub-720p.
Matt: Okay.
So there's no lower limit there?
Matt F: Yeah, I guess.
Steve: One by one.
Matt F: Go all the way down if you really want to.
Phil: That's really low definition, really SD.
Matt: Because I remember when I was legally
getting videos online occasionally in college,
one of my favorite resolutions was 576p.
Steve: Yeah, that's a thing.
I think that's native
DVD quality, didn't take quite as long to download,
legally, and it looked fine on my crappy 720p TV.
It was fine.
So at what point did we make this transition
into 720p feeling kind of standard?
Because at this point, if a video's not online,
and it isn't 720p, then are you even videoing?
Matt F: Going back to the brand of Vimeo,
this is why it was birthed in the first place.
Vimeo prided itself as supporting HD video
very early on, right out of the gate.
It's crazy to think that this
was only years ago, not decades ago.
Steve: It was probably 2006, 2007?
I remember there was whole slew of companies
that wanted to be the HD YouTube.
I could probably name 50 at one point
around 2007, 2008.
Matt F: Absolutely.
Steve: And then Vimeo really owned that space,
YouTube eventually brought out HD,
but there was definitely a wave there
of people jumping on board like, yeah, HD's the thing.
Matt F: And it's similar to the landscape we have today,
where you have the battle of, just because
there's a user-generated content platform
to deliver this content, you still need people
to create it. You still need people to generate
the content and put it up there for consumption.
And then on top of that you need to be able to consume it.
So whether that means having hardware capabilities
or internet capabilities as a bottleneck to overcome,
that's just more and more variability.
I think when you compare and contrast it
to today's ecosystem, there's a lot of similarities.
Matt: Let's talk about 4K.
I think most online service providers
would cap out at 1080p.
I don't think I've seen anything higher than 1080p,
and you're lucky if you get that online today.
I feel like most HD, if you're clicking HD
you're getting 720p, maybe you're getting 1080p.
Steve: You even have the phone plans now,
they define SD as 480p and under.
And they'll try and cap you.
It's based on bit rate but they'll try
and cap you at the resolution sizes
that 480p is SD and 720p is HD
and I think they don't let you go above that.
If you're on one of these unlimited plans
where you can turn on the smart video capping
or whatever, then yeah.
Matt: In air quotes, "unlimited".
Steve: Yeah, exactly.
Matt F: I'm curious as to
how big of an issue that could potentially present
down the road, where we're not really
decoupling bit rate from resolution.
And as we strive to lower bit rates
and increase resolutions, how that manifests itself
from especially a cell phone plan concept.
Phil: I actually found in testing something the other day,
a British internet service provider
that was man-in-the-middling HLS manifests
and stripping out higher bit rates.
Steve: No way!
Phil: I'm not going to name
and shame, but it's out there.
Steve: Would SSL help there?
If you're an internet service provider today
and you want to actually deliver HD...
Phil: Yeah, this is essentially
how we found it. We found it because we realized
manifest was not behaving the same way
over TLS as it was over Clear.
Steve: Wow.
Phil: Yeah.
Matt: So, we've gotten to 720p, 1080p.
Some people can see it, some people can't.
Where does 4K fall into that,
in terms of the support spectrum today?
What is 4K in your mind, watchable 4K?
Reasonably today, if a website says, "we support 4K",
at what point do you say "bullshit",
and what point do you say, "yeah, that's legit"?
Matt F: Again, I think you have to really
look at it from two perspectives.
There's the bit rate and then there's the resolution.
Anybody can deliver a 4K resolution
with very low bit rate and I don't think
the viewing experience would benefit from it whatsoever.
The landscape as it exists today is a wide spectrum
but narrow usage, I would say.
Again going back to the idea that when you look at it
from just the 1080p perspective,
and when 1080p first came out.
It wasn't too long ago when having a 1080p TV
was all the rage. It was a big deal
to jump up even from 720p to 1080p, in my opinion, at least.
And then the down-scaling factor came in as well
when you had 1080p content being down-scaled
to the 720p display, it looked alright as well.
So the landscape today in terms of content is growing,
and I think 4K is still in its relative infancy.
Once you start seeing more and more content
down to the handheld devices, cell phone devices
start really pushing more and more 4K video,
that really helps drive a lot of the ecosystem as well.
But it's end-to-end, it's about the creators
and it's about the consumers.
So without easy access to 4K televisions
and an internet service provider that can provide you
with enough down to support 4K,
and I'm talking, let's say, 30+ megabit downloads
just for that one video, without all those pieces
to the equation, I don't think it
can ever necessarily be solved across the board.
But that being said, I think the spectrum,
as I've mentioned, just keeps getting wider.
There's people that couldn't download 1080p today
in some parts of the world, they're going
to have trouble doing that.
They'll probably favor a 720p or even 540p stream.
But there's 2K video out there right now
and there's a fair amount of it.
There's 4K video out there now
and there's growing numbers of that as well.
From an engineer's perspective, it creates more challenges.
I think delivery and smart delivery
is going to be a challenge that increases over time,
especially with the landscape we're in right now.
We've only really been talking about television screens
and computer screens from this perspective, too.
So we can even just start scraping the surface
with the idea of VR and spherical video
and things like that, where I think the conversation
completely stems off into a new direction.
But I think it only continues to validate the need
for these high resolutions over time.
Matt: Let's talk about why
you think this is necessary, and do you think
it's necessary in 2018?
Earlier, before we started recording,
we were talking about why this is needed.
When you say that, do you think this is needed
in terms of, as an industry we need
to be thinking about this for next year,
or is 4K just a gimmick at NAB and IBC in 2017, 2018,
and it's not something that we
should really care about for consumers?
Or do you think this is something
that we need to start worrying about now?
Or do you think is is something
that we need to start worrying about in 2020?
Do you see what I'm saying?
Matt F: Oh absolutely, yeah.
I think it's not a deadline-driven investment.
From our perspective and a lot of,
and I say people working in the video industry,
and even from a consumer's perspective,
I wouldn't say there's any deadline.
There's no prioritization around it.
If it's accessible and it's not expensive,
people will flock to it, I don't see why they wouldn't.
But I think we're reaching a new realm
where you're going to have those people
that will continually argue that having
a 60-inch display, which is a relatively large display
even in today's standards, you're not going
to see any benefit between 4K and 8K,
just from a perception perspective.
And the argument that anything about 4K
requires an 80-inch display, I think looking at it
in that perspective is a little bit narrow-minded.
There's a lot of areas, as we've just mentioned,
like the whole VR tier that I think
that's a huge conversation to have
in terms of putting validity behind any of this.
Steve: Just talking about VR as higher resolution itself,
because it's essentially just a bigger video.
Matt F: Right, I don't think
anybody in today's landscape is having
absolute jaw-drop factors with spherical video.
I think spherical video is great,
I think it's a step in a very cool direction.
Whenever I look at spherical video and VR
integrations with video, I think
just from an educational perspective.
I couldn't imagine how cool it would be to be in school
and have VR integrated into the classroom
or something like that.
But there's a lot of other use cases
that I think a lot of people ignore,
thinking from a content creator's perspective,
just because they're filming in 8K
doesn't mean they necessarily want people
to consume it in 8K.
They can be down-sampled or cropped and edited,
which is, I think, a huge benefit
from a creator's perspective.
To be able to film in 8K and not even
have to pan the camera but be able
to do that in post, I think is very enabling
for editors and directors and content creators.
Steve: How interesting. So they could crop down
into the frame, so they have a much wider resolution
so they can move the camera around
within that wider frame.
Matt F: Absolutely.
Steve: That's interesting.
Matt F: Right.
The idea of having more ability to do things in post
and keep things as high quality as you expected,
I think that's very cool.
And again, an area of interest a lot of people
don't necessarily think about
when they're on the consumption side of the equation.
Phil: It's one of those things that suddenly came up
when we talked weeks ago about light field cameras as well,
making a lot more decisions in post rather than
it really being about high resolution immediately.
It's more about giving the directors and producers
and the editors more decisions later
down the production chain, and I think
we get the same thing here.
Matt F:
But I think the next step past that is, okay,
I have a film that I'm working on and it's shot in 8K.
That's fine, we're probably going to release it
at a 4K max or even a 1080p video online.
There's still the question about shareability factor
of that content during its creation,
and the feasibility of using online tools to do that.
If I had a 4-plus-K video and put it online
for my team to all view and put notes on
and play back on their home televisions
to do test views of it and such,
why shouldn't we enable that?
Why should the rule be that, oh,
it's not worthwhile for the grand audience,
so you're just going to have to plug in a hard drive
or figure out some kind of high-capacity vast solution
for storing your content and playing it back
on devices for your unique use case.
From our perspective, I think it would be
a little ignorant not to pay attention to it
and not to give it the interest that it deserves.
But I think the big unanswered question
that everybody would ask is, when does it become a reality?
And I think that's a tough question to answer.
I think the only concrete date or time
or expectation I've really seen around it
is the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo,
which will be broadcast in 8K.
Steve: Whoa, really?
Matt F: Now, who can consume that outside of Japan?
Because at the end of the day, the Japanese
are really leading the way and they have for quite a while.
But the NHK has done some really cool stuff
and research and they're always
ahead of the curve around this and I think
what they're doing, especially around
their involvement with the 2020 Olympics,
or so it seems up to this point,
will really help solidify the need for this.
And where the need is more evident,
I think we'll find out as we travel down that road.
Phil: It's interesting because the first demo I saw of 4K
was Olympics content when I was working at BBC
and we actually had NHK come over
and demo a load of the stuff that they were doing for it.
It's going down a load of BBC backbones,
experimental for the time of 2012 Olympics,
so it's not surprising but we can make sense,
I guess, of their pushing the 8K agenda for the next one.
Matt: When we talk about accessing,
maybe you could tell us from Vimeo's perspective,
when you're looking at user data for watching content,
what we've heard, for example, from folks at YouTube
is that surprisingly enough, people will
actually select a higher bandwidth
and then be okay with just waiting for that to load.
They're okay with a much longer startup time,
but they'd rather see the higher bit rate
even if it takes them longer to get there.
With Vimeo's perception as being high quality,
I would assume that people would do the same thing,
especially if you're watching art house
on there or something like that y
ou're not going to want to watch at 240p.
I assume you guys are already seeing this in some way
play out in your data.
Matt F: It's funny
you mention that in relation to initially speaking
about eBaum's World. Because I think that mentality
of the "play, pause, walk away, come back in 15 minutes
to watch your content", that's a very archaic
way of looking at things.
I think
it's reminiscent of progressive delivery,
where you're going to download the file
from start to finish either way.
If you kick off the download,
you know that the more time you wait,
the more you're going to be able
to consume when you come back.
That's not necessarily the case in today's world.
You could easily start a video and the buffering
algorithm within the playback mechanism
is going to allocate the buffer it sees adequate
to allow you to start playing back the video
and hopefully not rebuffer down the line,
but might not allow you to allocate any more buffer
than is configured in that mechanism.
So I don't know, when I look at the idea
of people play-pausing, walking away, and then coming back,
it's very circumstantial whether that's
actually going to benefit them or not.
But to that point, I think if I was to point a finger
at a demographic that would favor
that behavior more than others, it would be
less of the casual consumers and more
of the professional consumers.
People that, again, are working with creators
or giving feedback to creators
or have a reason to kill that time to watch content.
Generally speaking, I think a lot of the use cases
of people discovering content and playing it back,
they still really want that start time
to be as minimal as possible.
And it goes many ways, but again,
I think the main point I'm trying to make
is that it's a funny mentality to have
and I think it is really based off
of people's experience playing back progressive content,
not segmented content.
Steve: Yeah.
You touched on something there where
there's a lot of user expectations built into this.
That's going to be a major driver, I think,
of adoption of these formats.
One of the things that we've heard,
and maybe you guys have experienced this,
when you increase the video resolution
for the general audience, most people don't notice.
That's not going to have a huge impact
on your watch time, right?
But if you then brought it back down,
that's when you'll see the impact.
People will get used to the higher-quality resolution
and not like the lower resolution and start to complain.
So I think that's really interesting,
it almost means that whoever gets there first
is going to be pushing everybody else
to be upgrading their resolution.
For instance, if Vimeo or YouTube started doing 4K
as a norm, and assuming that there were devices
that supported it, it would start to become
the user expectation and start to pull
everybody else to do the same.
And these consumers would go to other websites
and say, "Oh, the video here is crap."
Matt F: I think that brings us back to that topic
of really understanding how bit rate impacts resolution.
Because again, it's one thing to
encode or transcode to 4K, but if you
don't have the bit rate to back it up,
it's going to be heavily dependent
on the content you're viewing
as to how good it actually looks.
I think people will always strive
for more clear, beautiful looking video
with the best quality of experience they can possibly have.
Unfortunately, that's not always feasible,
and I think that spectrum of ability,
I guess you could say, to play back
and consume content continues to grow.
And I think that's one of the interesting parts
of this continual evolution down the line
of higher, higher resolutions, more bits
being shoved down the pipe, whether the ISP
or connection can handle it or not.
The demand will continue to grow.
Unfortunately, the ecosystem isn't growing
at the same pace as the demand,
and when you look at it from a worldwide perspective,
having the ability to have 10 megabit download speed
across the entire plant is still a dream.
That's a pretty crazy realization to have
when you start talking about delivering video content
that could be well over 50 megabits per second.
Phil: When we talk about the ability to consume
and the desire for content, where are we now
in terms of hardware support?
I'm sure I read a stat somewhere that said
15%, 20% of TVs that are being sold now
are UHD, airquote, "ready," 4K ready.
Where are we, realistically?
The mobile market is getting there,
but there's not that much that's anywhere close.
What was the feeling at CES this year?
Matt F: I think the 8K was generally a big talking point
at CES this year. But again, whether that's the hype train
rolling along and keeping people aware
that these hardware manufacturers are in this space
and they are thinking forward is very reassuring.
But whether or not that is something
that you'll see in your living room next year
I think is pretty doubtful.
You mentioned cell phones as well,
which I think is another thing to consider
because when you look at the lifespan
of the average consumer cell phone
as opposed to the lifespan of the same person's television,
they're dramatically different.
We're on 6-12 month cell phone lifespans now
for a lot of people, and people
don't do that with their televisions.
There's probably still a lot of people
that are comfortable getting home from work
and watching Netflix on their 1080p,
40-some-inch television and it works completely fine.
And there's no real need, until the price drops
so much that you need a new TV anyways
and the de facto solution is just a 4K display.
I think that is a major driver in terms
of when creators are considering
how they want to deliver their content
or how businesses want to deliver content,
whether it's worthwhile.
So you have these cell phone screens that are beautiful
and they're getting better and better,
but in terms of pixel density, how far do you go
before it's just not worthwhile
because of the size of the device?
Steve: When you're talking about a phone,
there's got to be a max.
We're talking, Apple sells retina displays...
Matt F: Retina displays look beautiful until you put
a magnifying lens in front of it
and put the screen two inches away from your face
in a VR headset, and then all of a sudden
you can start noticing pixels again.
As we continue all these new mediums
for playback, the equation grows,
and I think the considerations increase.
The idea of having 8K on a 60-plus inch television screen,
when you pull that into the mobile perspective,
it doesn't necessarily make sense.
Does it make more sense in some other playback mechanisms
than others, well if it's VR as opposed
to just watching a YouTube or Vimeo video
right on your handset in your hand, I think it does.
Does it mean that you deliver some types of video
for some playback options as opposed to others? Maybe.
But I still think when you think about the whole landscape,
there are areas that have a higher priority
or a higher validity of use around
some of these resolutions.
Phil: It's super interesting
because obviously, Netflix's post-production guidelines
say for an original, you have to deliver it in 4K.
You can't deliver it in anything under 4K.
I think the minimum bit rate is like 240 megabits as well
for what you're delivering into Netflix,
regardless of whether they actually choose
to deliver it at that sort of resolution.
If you're shooting a Netflix original,
you'd better be shooting it at 4K.
Matt F: Right, and it makes sense when you think about it.
They're pushing a lot of 4K content.
And especially around their originals,
when you talk about uniformity
and expectations around playback quality,
if you're watching one Netflix original tonight
and it looked gorgeous, and then you watch
another one tomorrow that's a Netflix original as well,
but of lesser quality, maybe it's noticeable,
maybe it's not, that's a great question.
But creating some uniformity behind it
I think would remove a lot of potential bad feedback.
Phil: If it's Netflix content, all I know
is it's going to be really grainy.
Every original is grainy.
I don't want film grain, I know you didn't shoot it on film!
Matt: So far we've been talking about this
largely from the perspective of the consumer,
what the consumer wants, what the hardware can support.
Everybody in front of a microphone right now
is more on the delivery side of that equation,
basically making this stuff play back in a web browser
or in some other sort of online delivery way.
A lot of this is already giving me
a little bit of heartburn. So yeah,
for people in our industry, why are people
going to hate this, aside from just massive CDN bills
and chucking the shit around internally in your pipelines.
Why are people going to hate it,
and are people going to not hate it enough?
It's the customer love and our hate,
at what point does that cross each other?
Matt F: That's a great question.
I guess it depends how deep your pockets are.
But I think something to consider to that point is,
as you increase the resolution or your highest profile
available, let's say, generally it's not just that.
The transcode ladder is going to increase
in the steps to get there.
Going from 1080p to 4K, if you're working
on a good bit rate like a good AVR strategy,
generally you don't want to make jumps from 1080p to 4K.
That's going to be a pretty annoying
viewing experience, if even possible.
The circumstances to jump from 1080p to 4K
directly back and forth would be very unique.
But nevertheless, if you're going to deliver 4K content,
you would want the profiles to follow suit.
So that would mean 1080p, 2K, maybe 5K, 6K, 8K,
which dramatically increases transcode times,
the amount of effort that needs to go
into just getting the video into a format
that can be delivered over the web.
Then you have to deal with all the storage costs
of storing all of that video, and then the delivery costs.
I think the bulk of the concern from the platforms
that are delivering this is more
from a transcode perspective, because it depends
on how many people are watching it.
It's all relative to how much
you're going to actually pay for it
to how much you're delivering it.
If you're transcoding everything and only
a small fraction of your consumers
are watching the highest profile,
I think that's the big consideration to make.
But at the end of the day, this is all doable now.
It's just circumstantial as to if it fits the model
at whatever you're working with
and whatever you want to deliver,
and how you want to deliver it
and who you're delivering it to.
Phil: This all feeds into next-gen codecs.
Because if you're a Netflix subscriber,
you only get UHD, 4K content over HEVC.
They don't deliver it any other way, there is no H264.
And in my mind, I don't see anyone delivering 8K.
Do we really think people are going
to deliver 8K over the internet in HEVC?
Or is it something that's going to be
something we don't realistically see
until we've got AV1 out there and actually
get some gains from that?
Matt F: Yeah, whether that's
a physical blocker, it's not.
It's not an absolute blocker because
we can accomplish 8K video with HEVC right now.
Whether that's the best solution
and whether that drives it into a much higher
saturation point amongst the industry
and consumers and creators, that's a good point.
Again, I think the high priority ticket there
in that question is the ISPs and what people
can actually obtain in terms of bandwidth to their house.
Again, looking at it from a worldwide perspective,
and 10 megabits is the dream for everybody,
then somebody else can have fiber to their door.
So it's a very, very large playing field to consider.
I think it's going to continue to grow.
Whether HEVC will get us there and get us
to a saturation point that maybe what 4K or 1080p is now,
I wouldn't want to bet either way,
but I see it being a kicker, but maybe not the receiver
that's going to take us all the way into the end zone.
You know what I mean?
Phil: Do you ever feel what sort of bit rate
we need to be talking about the HEVC 8K
to be meaningfully pretty on, say, 65-, 70-inch display?
Matt F: I don't really like to think of that
in the CBR mentality, more like the VBR mentality.
I think the range is, I'm sure everybody
has their own opinions on this.
I would say anything above 50 megabits
is good-looking 8K, it's circumstantial
depending on what the video is.
If we're talking something that has beautiful,
sharp edges or a lot of colors or a lot of movement,
that's going to change. But you can get away
with relatively good looking 8K at sub-50 megabit.
Whether that is what we'll consider a standard,
I don't know. I think right now
anything below 50 megabits on an 8K video
is just getting us to 8K in the environment we're in now.
If you had the feasibility to up the bit rate,
I think everybody would take it if they could.
Phil: So does that mean we need to start thinking
about a new physical medium?
Blu-ray's got us a long way.
Blu-ray surprisingly got us to ultra high-def
4K UHD delivery. Do we think Blu-ray,
even the high-storage Blu-rays, are going to get us anywhere
with 8K? Or are we getting towards the end
of physical media at all in that format?
Matt: Wow, interesting.
Matt F: Yeah,
that is a great question.
Steve: We need a Blu-ray
the size of a LaserDisc.
Matt: You heard it here first, online delivery is dead.
Matt F: Yeah, that's a great question though.
As somebody that doesn't have a DVD player
or a Blu-ray player in my house,
I wouldn't be sad to not see that come to fruition.
But that's not fair, that's not a fair way to look at that.
Going back to the fact that the majority
of the world can't have an internet connection
that can deal with 2K video, I think that's a valid concern.
Whether that manifests itself in a completely new medium
or not, I think is the real question.
I don't think we're ready for a new medium.
I think the concept of digital storage for video
has ran its course. I knock on wood,
I could be completely wrong in saying this.
But if you have the capability on your internet connection
to be able to download that quality of video,
then I think you've pulled yourself out of that race.
So as that group size continues to get smaller
and smaller, is it worthwhile for manufacturers
to even create new devices, knowing that they're going
to have a shorter lifespan than
what would be considered that of a DVD player?
Great question, I wish I had more insight into that
but I'm the type of person that
is out of that game completely.
Steve: Yeah, I feel like today it's a hard drive.
How often do you want a physical device
that can only store one movie?
Matt F: Right.
Yeah, you would think that if we evolved
into a new medium, we would just have solid state drives
in our pockets and use that.
You'd go up to rent a solid state drive.
Steve: Redbox.
Matt F: Right.
Phil: It's really interesting for me
because I thought this and then I bought
ultra high-def Blu-ray and I actually
ended up having to buy the player to go with it,
which actually ended up being an Xbox One.
But I was blown away by how much better it was
than Netflix's 4K, I really was.
Because I realized the bit rates for the dual layer
is like 82-108 megabit, that's a lot of data
when you talk about HEVC as well.
I was blown away by how good it looked in comparison.
I actually tried to find a movie that was out
on ultra high-def Blu-ray and on one
of the streaming services in UHD
so I could back-to-back them and have strong opinions,
but couldn't find any, annoyingly.
Matt: Question is, can you get Altered Carbon
on DVD from Netflix's DVD service?
Phil: That show's pretty violent.
That surprised me.
I wasn't expecting it.
Matt: Quite enjoying it so far.
Matt F: I am really enjoying it.
Matt: That show in particular plays well into the next question
of, how does HDR play into all of this?
When we talk about 4K, HDR is the other word
that's thrown around a lot in terms of new advancements
and high quality viewing experiences.
So, what is the relationship between 4K
and HDR in your mind?
Matt F: In terms of HDR
increasing the color gamut and actually seeing more colors
in video content, effectively, I think
it's a super important change that is going
to be slower to manifest itself than I would like to see.
In terms of its relationship to resolution,
I've always been of the mindset
that they're pretty independent from one another.
I
think a lot of the comparisons are just being made
in relation to resolution because of the time
we're at right now, the move from H264
into the H265 realm, the support for it
at a higher quality, but also on devices that support it,
which are of higher quality now.
So I think all the pieces are just falling
onto the same table at the same time,
and I think a lot of those relationships
or thoughts around how the two are related
are just more circumstantial than anything.
Nevertheless, as excited as I am about
higher resolution, especially on different mediums
and different platforms, I'm just as excited for HDR.
I think once you start consuming actual HDR content,
especially on a big, beautiful screen,
you realize how awesome it actually is.
And how that represents itself with different
types of content, like sports, would be awesome,
more and more movies, feature films and such.
It will really help benefit the landscape.
Coupled with high resolution, coupled with areas
like virtual reality, I think
only make it better and better.
Especially in virtual reality if you're watching 360 video.
The more it hurts my eyes to look at the sun in a video,
the better, in my opinion.
Pulling yourself into the virtual reality landscape
that anything we can do to trick your mind,
to keep you tricked for a longer period of time,
creates a better experience.
Doing that with games and such and full motion capture,
I think is much easier to accomplish
than just a 360 video with a fixed camera position,
or at least what we're used to with 360 content right now.
So removing the screen door effect
with increasing the size of the video,
the resolution of the video, the bit rate of the video,
the color spectrum of the video,
I think all gets us closer to a world
where that false reality can continue
to trick your mind longer than, say,
just watching a general 360 video
where you can see the stitching
and you can see the blurriness
and you can't see things far away.
Related, but I think coincidentally related, in my opinion.
Matt: Got it.
Phil: I think a lot of people
would say that 1080p high dynamic range content
looks better than 4K, especially when you think
about on a screen, if you've got some bandwidth to spare
but not enough to get a full UHD 4K stream down the pipe,
a lot of people are going to get much more benefit,
visually, from picking up a 1080p stream.
Matt F: Sure, yeah, can't argue with that.
And on top of that, I think watching a 1080p
that was down-sampled from 4K content looks even better.
Phil: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Matt F: Again, going back
to the argument that from a creator's perspective
I think there's more validity behind super high resolutions
now, especially in the online ecosystem,
than the consumers, because of all of the hurdles
that a consumer has to jump over just to get it,
if they can even find the content.
From a creator's perspective,
the amount of doors you open by overshooting
or down-sampling that content are monumental.
That can be a huge win.
But I'm looking at this as somebody
who's not necessarily a creator,
and looking at it as a fly on the wall.
In my opinion it would be a much better circumstance
to be in, to have overshot things and to have
more options in the editing room.
Steve: How long until I can shoot 4K on my phone, do you think?
Matt F: It depends what kind of 4K, again.
I'm sure a lot of phones have sensors
that can shoot nice 4K video, whether that's
a high bit rate, whether it has the frames per second
that shooting sub-30 FPS 4K as opposed to 60 FPS 4K,
at what bit rate, yeah, I don't think
that world is far off at all.
I think that world's coming to fruition already.
Again, you ask yourself how does that manifest itself
when you go and look at just point and shoot content?
Maybe the realm of very jittery content
that is shot on 4K, does that open up a realm
that allows video stabilization algorithms to work better?
They have a lot more room for correction,
so that sure, you're still overshooting on your phone,
but everything is going to come out
looking like it was shot on a dolly.
That would be great if you had the option.
So from a creator's perspective,
I think the option increase is great.
Then the big question is, do you use the internet
to facilitate a mechanism to allow creators
to share and create and modify and collaborate online
around this content in its native form?
Or do you just go ahead and run a transcode
over that raw content so it can be dealt with online
and then brought back almost verbally
to an editor who's dealing with the raw,
just that back and forth seems a little ludicrous.
It might be circumstantial in terms
of how people are set up today, but in a perfect world,
I think if you can facilitate all this
over the internet, it would be the best case.
I think this goes back to, why bother
having a new hard physical medium for video
past Blu-ray now, when and if you can facilitate
plus-4K content over the internet?
Matt: Cool. Well, we're coming up on time.
So I would like to say that I think the end goal
that we've come to here is that we know
we've made it once we need to wear eclipse sunglasses
when we watch content on a television, right?
Matt F: That would be amazing, yeah.
We'll all have welder's masks on our desks
so we can have some longevity in our profession.
Matt: Perfect.
Matt F: There's a million-dollar idea for you right now.
Matt: I think that's also a million-dollar
attack vector for the nation.
Thank you so much for joining, Matt.
This has been awesome.
Matt F: I appreciate it,
it was great to be here.
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