4K & WebRTC: A Tangential Observation
A short while ago Chris Koehncke posed the question, “Is 4K video viable for a WebRTC web application?” He also offered a well-reasoned opinion. While there’s technical support for 4K in browsers, and 4K webcams are starting to appear, in various ways bandwidth remains a constraint. As a purely practical matter, and in the most common use case, he’s perfectly correct.
The folks over at the Red5Pro blog offer a mildly dissenting opinion. They note that for use-cases beyond video conferencing, most especially one-way streams, 4K is quite practical. People stream Netflix at 4K. Heck, I’ve done it myself at least once or twice.
News coming out of last week’s NAB2013 conference is that 3DTV is definitely subsiding. Some might say it’s dying, but I expect that it will hang around in some applications. Certainly the movie studios will keep cranking out 3D movies in order to sustain the logic of the theatre chains ongoing transition to digital projection.