Your TV Is Too Good for You

Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15 percent, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25 percent. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies. And yet, super-high-res content seems to be receding ever further into a specialty consumer niche. What happened?

4K certainly is ubiquitous; you won’t find many sets with lower resolution for sale at Best Buy. In practice, though, the technology is rarely used. Cable signals are generally mere HD, as are the standard plans on most streaming services. And the fancy new displays, as they’re placed and viewed in people’s homes, may never end up looking any sharper than the old ones, no matter what Netflix plan you have. In short, the ultra-high-definition future for TV has turned out to be a lie.

A relentless narrative of progress brought us to this point, but it did not begin in 2012, when the first 4K televisions were brought to market at roughly the price of a Honda Accord. Rather it extends back into the early days of TV, with the idea that picture quality can and always will be improved: first with the introduction of color sets, then with bigger screens, then with added pixels. But sometimes progress ends. The peak of television-picture quality, as actually seen by TV viewers, was reached 15 years ago, and we’ve been coasting ever since. Forget the cable signals and the streaming plans. Most people just can’t sit close enough to today’s televisions to make full use of their picture.

Years ago, sitting too close was the problem. If you’re old enough to remember watching cathode-ray-tube sets, you may have been enjoined to give them space: Move back from the TV! The reasons were many. Cold War–addled viewers had developed the (somewhat justified) fear that televisions emitted radiation, for one. And the TV—still known as the “boob tube” because it might turn its viewers into idiots—was considered a dangerous lure. Its resolution was another problem: If you got close enough to the tube, you could see the color image break down into the red, blue, and green phosphor dots that composed its picture.

All of these factors helped affirm the TV’s appropriate positioning—best viewed at a middle distance—and thus its proper role within the home. A television was to be seen from across the room, and it could be used as much for ambience as for focused viewing. A soap opera or a news program or a cartoon might be on while people in the house read newspapers, balanced checkbooks, cooked meals, or vacuumed—the second-screen activities of the age before second screens. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously described television as a “cool” medium, one that provides somewhat meager sensory stimulation, as opposed to a “hot” medium such as cinema, which intensely targets the eyes and ears.

The advent of high-definition TVs, with more than quadruple the resolution of what came before, changed all that. By 2008, when this Great Upgrade was fully under way, the nature of the medium itself appeared to have been altered. Now you could see the detail in people’s faces for the first time—maybe even too much detail. And higher picture resolution, when combined with another new technology—flat displays—allowed for the popularity of much larger televisions. In the old days, your 32-inch “big-screen TV” would look like garbage if you didn’t sit all the way across the room. Now you could get much closer and the picture on a 65-inch HD set would still look fine.

Or better than fine. With the crisp picture on a screen that big, TV could be made to look more cinematic. Dramas of the so-called second golden age of television—The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and so forth—might not have grabbed our attention as effectively had they been produced in a style more befitting of the older, smaller, low-res sets. HD made television more arresting—more hot and less cool.

But television technology pressed on. A 4K TV has four times the resolution of an HD set, which suggests that screens might get even hotter, even bigger than they’ve ever been before. In practice, though, these newer sets haven’t really changed the medium at all. If anything, all of those pixels have allowed too much; they’ve become decoupled from the normal scale of domestic life and home design. According to the many TV-size-to-distance calculators available online, when you’re sitting on a couch a dozen feet from your television, a 65-inch screen will look the same whether it’s HD or 4K. The latter has more pixels, but your eyes won’t pick them up. You’ll never know the difference. For the picture to look much better—for you to “see” the benefits of modern ultra-high resolution—you’d need to upgrade to a preposterously large screen, more than 100 inches in diagonal.

These days you can buy a set like that for a few thousand dollars—but where exactly would you put it? Our living rooms are designed for living in, not for viewing giant 4K screens up close. I’m sure that, as of 2024, most people still arrange their homes around their furniture, and then they put their television where it fits. Some screens end up getting mounted high up on the wall, perhaps above a fireplace, where they will be even farther from any viewer’s pixel-counting retinas.

Home-theater snobs lament these practices. They’ll tell you that a 4K set should be viewed from a distance of about one and a half times the screen size and at eye level. They’re right about optimal viewing practices, but they’re wrong about what other people want from television. TV’s function as a cool medium never really went away, even through the hotter age of peak TV. As a home activity, watching television now serves more or less the same purpose it did during the 1960s. The TV is still a family-room appliance, and it’s still one that can be used for focused watching, or for ambience while daily life unfolds within its glow. Even when you happen to be watching uncompressed 4K on a properly sized television at a distance from which the resolution is visible, you might still be doing other things, such as scrolling on your phone or talking with your partner. (These days, people often skip the TV altogether and watch videos up close on their smartphones, and yet tellingly, smartphones almost never come with 4K screens.)

The mismatch between television technology and television use seems to be only getting worse. The newest TVs are billed as being 8K Ultra HD—with four times the picture quality of your 4K set! At that hypertrophied resolution, you can’t sit more than a few feet from an 80-inch screen if you want to maximize its benefits. This betrays any sense of the human scale of viewership, or of elementary principles of living-room design. If 4K is a lie, then 8K is a joke.

The greater truth is that TV is fine the way it is. Your HD set is already huge, bright, and clear enough for the bedroom or the den. No more resolution will be necessary. The technologies of streaming media and viewing screens may still improve in other ways—better compression, blacker blacks, broader color range—but when it comes to pixels, we’re already done.