I saw a post the other day that, briefly in passing, derided Standard Definition as being bad/not very useful. I don't remember exactly what, but I think that's a shared opinion by most people.
So I've been thinking about that, along with some recent experiences watching old (80s/90s) TV shows on not amazing quality tape via a not amazing quality CRT TV. I think, ultimately, a lot of stuff does not need high fidelity video. It can, but it's a waste. A very tangible waste.
Today I watched some Summoning Salt (no there's not a new one) at a friends and was driving home and realized... it didn't need to be in 4K. When I got home and checked it thankfully is not, it's 1080p, but really those could be 720p or even 480p and not really lose anything. I think the same could be said for a large portion of youtube and TV video, the extra resolution is just not needed.
And that extra resolution costs a lot. It takes more space and resources to produce the original video, it takes more energy to transfer that data to wherever the data lives online. It takes more energy to re-encode that into whatever formats the streaming vendor prefers, again to transfer it back and again to play back for the end user. I checked the video I had watched and the full quality 1080p copies are about 550MiB for the video stream. The 480p is more like 100MiB, but also 30FPS so that's more like 2-3x smaller vs 5-10x. Curiously the 720p60 stream is 184MiB, so maybe the 480p isn't compressed as efficiently as it could be. The amount of energy that would save at scale would be insane.
Of course, that would never happen. Walking any technology back tends to be frowned upon as it makes a lot of people look stupid, and also makes a lot of people NOT richer. People always stand to make money by forcefully driving technology forward regardless of the end results, be those intended or unintended outcomes. Also, frankly, LCDs are really good at making lower quality video look worse than it should, and CRTs aren't coming back for better (probably more resource intensive) or worse (just a hell of a lot better than LCDs except for pure text).
Also some stuff does actually need the visual fidelity. Sports? Break out the BlackMagik CineMaster64 64K cameras. News? Yeah same probably. Movies? Well you're watching those in a theatre in theory so yeah sure, do whatever you want.
I do honestly think most people's perception of how bad SD video is has been distorted by low bitrate low framerate digital video being poorly upscaled on LCDs. I'm sure there's some people out there who, even without all of the above things, still hate it. I do honestly think the world would be better off with less 4K everywhere and I think that's absolutely not going to happen. But no one can stop me blabbering on about it, huh?
