Why 4K/UltraHD/2160p television will never become the common standard of American television

You may have heard about 4K, Ultra HD, or 2160p television (they’re all the same thing, and I’ll refer to it as 4K in the rest of the blog post for simplicity). Next month, television viewers with a 4K television set, DirecTV satellite television service, and the right DirecTV programming package and equipment will be able to watch a special feed of The Masters golf tournament that will provide coverage of holes 11, 12, and 13 of the Augusta National Golf Club’s main golf course in 4K. The Masters is an interesting choice for the first live 4K television broadcast in U.S. history that I’m aware of, since The Masters has historically been behind the times when it has come to golf broadcasting technology and practices.

There are several reasons why I believe that 4K will not become the standard format of American television broadcasting, or, for that matter, video broadcasting and streaming in general:

• Most 4K televisions are very large – I live in a house that is approximately 1,000 square feet in size, and it would be difficult to fit a 4K television in any of the three rooms we currently have 720p/1080i-capable HDTVs. Very few 4K-capable television sets are smaller than 40 inches, and many of them are much larger than that.
• Making 4K-compatible computer monitors (especially the case for laptops), tablets, and smartphones is very difficult, if not impossible – These devices have screens that are much smaller than the screen of a typical 4K television set. Try fitting 8,294,400 pixels on a smartphone screen, and you’ll get a general idea of what I’m talking about.
• Our television infrastructure was built for 720p, 1080i, and 1080p, not 4K – Transmitting a 4K television signal takes up a lot more of the available bit rate than 720p, 1080i, or 1080p. If it’s even possible to transmit 4K over-the-air, transmitting an over-the-air 4K signal would take up most, if not all, of a 6 MHz over-the-air digital television transmission channel’s bit rate, leaving no room for over-the-air subchannels in any format. Cable and satellite television providers use most or all of their available bitrate to provide hundreds of 720p, 1080i, and 1080p channels and other viewing options, so it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to provide more than a few 4K options to their viewers.
• It would require faster internet connections to stream 4K video over an internet connection – I have an internet connection that provides roughly 18 megabytes per second of combined upload/download speed, and I have little trouble streaming 720p, 1080i, or 1080p video. However, streaming 4K video would require a considerably faster internet connection.

While 4K will probably become commonly used in some practices, such as movie theaters and video games, to expect 4K to become the television industry standard for broadcasting television is laughably absurd.

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Bernie Sanders running brilliant first television ad in Iowa and New Hampshire

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the first Bernie Sanders television advertisement of the 2016 presidential election:

According to the Associated Press (AP), the ad is scheduled to air in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote on major-party presidential nominees, for ten days, and the Sanders campaign is spending a total of $2 million on the ad buy.

I think that the ad is an excellent introductory ad for Bernie. In fact, Bernie could use the same exact ad for a first general election ad buy, if he were to win the Democratic nomination. While the AP claimed that the ad included “a not-subtle dig at the (Hillary) Clinton political brand” for including a clip of Bernie saying that “people are sick and tired of establishment politics”, Bernie has been fighting the political establishment in America for his entire adult life.

Illinois Department of Transportation is running the worst ad campaign ever

If you’re a taxpayer in the State of Illinois, your taxpayer dollars are paying for…well, this horrible TV ad:

Yes, that is an actual taxpayer-funded public service announcement (PSA) from the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). While the intent of IDOT’s “The Driving Dead” ad campaign is to encourage people to drive safely in order to have a lower risk of being killed in an automobile crash on our state’s roads, I didn’t get that message at all from watching the PSA. I saw either the PSA shown above or a different one from the same ad campaign at least once during the FOX broadcast of the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race last night, and it was not obvious to me that it was a PSA designed to encourage people to drive safely until I stumbled upon the ad campaign’s website. Who the hell came up with this ad campaign?

Let me make it clear that I’m not against taxpayer-funded PSAs at all, but there certainly has to be a much better way to encourage people to drive safely on our state’s roads and highways.

The New York City media is a textbook example of how the corporate media encourages racism in America

The local news media in the New York City television market, the largest local television market in the entire country, is a textbook example of how the local television newscasts in this country encourage racism in America.

Color of Change, an organization noted for its progressive and civil rights advocacy, published this infographic to their Twitter page. The infographic makes these two main points:

1. While 51% of the people arrested by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for murder, assault, and/or theft are black, a whopping 75% of the people that local television newscasts in the New York City market broadcast as being responsible for murder, assault, and/or theft are black.
2. The fact that the local television newscasts in the New York City market broadcast instances of black people being responsible for crimes at a considerably higher percentage than the percentage of black people who are arrested by the NYPD for crimes cause many non-black viewers in the New York City area to develop hatred towards black people and drive a stereotype that all black people are criminals that should be avoided at all costs, which is an absolutely false stereotype.

You can view the full report on how local television newscasts in the New York City media market encourage racism in the New York City area here. The report studied local newscasts on four New York City local TV stations: WCBS-TV, WNBC-TV, WNYW-TV, and WABC-TV.

As a resident of the Champaign-Springfield television market in Illinois, I can attest that the local TV stations around here also broadcast instances of black people being accused of crimes at a far higher rate than the percentage of black people in the area covered by the Champaign-Springfield television market. In fact, the fact that local TV stations across the country tend to report instances of black people being accused of crimes at a far higher rate than the percentage of black people in the local television markets they serve is, more than likely, a nationwide problem that is dividing this country along racial lines.