A recent paper from InterDigital and Futuresource explores the tremendous growth of the TV and video industry over the past few decades which has resulted in more annual greenhouse gases emissions than the aerospace industry. Recent climate and weather disasters have highlighted the need for the media and entertainment industry to take on a bigger role to exemplify what a more sustainable future could look like – because of its inherent visibility, this industry is well-positioned to lead by example.
The vast video value chain spans “glass to glass,” from the camera lens to the audience’s display screen and every stage in between. Here we’ll focus on that display. Today, there are more than 2 billion televisions installed worldwide, accounting for roughly half of all the energy consumed by the video industry. This offers a huge opportunity for energy savings.
At the same time, the video industry has driven TV resolution to exciting new levels, with 4K screens becoming the norm and some 8K TVs growing more affordable. Given the resolution of these televisions, not to mention their growing size, they are able to offer incredibly realistic and immersive pictures. But it also comes at a cost – increased energy use. In fact, our paper finds that 8K TVs produce nearly double (1.77x) the carbon emissions of their 4K counterparts, which is an important consideration as we implement these exciting new technologies.
But why do 8K TVs use SO much more energy? Simply put, every pixel is required to produce light, and producing light requires energy. In the case of 8K televisions, they have four times more pixels than a similar screen at 4K resolution, and sixteen times more pixels than at 1080p. This increase in pixels, in conjunction with an increase in screen size, translates to a great deal more energy usage, and the content it displays also becomes more energy-intensive to store, encode, and transmit.
Much has been written about whether 8K televisions are worth the investment for the average consumer. Unless your screen is larger than 85 inches AND you are viewing it from less than five feet away, the human eye can’t meaningfully tell the difference between 4K and 8K resolution. And few can shoulder the cost – Sharp, for instance, offers a truly massive 120-inch 8K display that boasts 33 million pixels, at a price tag of over $100,000. For these reasons, the promise of 8K televisions lies outside the average consumer application in a living room or home theater and instead finds greater value in enterprise-class TV installations and large public experiences.
Is there a bright future for 8K?
So, given the substantial financial and environmental costs of these hyper-high-resolution displays, is there a real opportunity for 8K or displays with even higher resolution?
The answer is yes.
Looking ahead, the opportunity for 8K lies in enterprise-class TV installations and large public experiences. For example, the Las Vegas Sphere is a massive orb-shaped arena near the Las Vegas Strip that features the world’s largest high-res display. The Sphere’s screen is 160,000 square feet and boasts a staggering 16K resolution that offers hyper-immersive experiences. The Fremont Street Experience, another Las Vegas attraction, features a 15K resolution screen that spans a quarter mile in length and offers nightly light shows and entertainment for the public. For sports fans looking for immersive game day experiences, Cosm is an immersive indoor venue that shows live sports events and features an immersive hemispheric 12K display that is 87 feet in diameter.
Elsewhere around the world, massive billboards and marketing displays have long dominated the visual field, including displays in major cities like New York’s Times Square, the Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, and this massive screen planned for Seoul’s Meyong-dong district.
Promise of Pixel Value Reduction
These large, high-definition displays represent an exciting opportunity for marketing, media, and experience-based services – if we are able to mitigate their energy costs.
InterDigital has developed an innovative Pixel Value Reduction (PVR) solution that can reduce the energy consumed by device displays of any size, without impacting the image quality as perceived by the viewer. PVR works in two ways: first by reducing the pixel brightness of a display to achieve a certain level of energy reduction without degrading the viewer experience, and second by leveraging AI/ML to customize the display of streamed media at a pixel-by-pixel level to ultimately reduce energy and conserve bandwidth. In practice, PVR analyzes video frames and creates a map of locations where pixel intensity can be reduced without affecting the perceived visual quality. Subjective studies have found that applications of PVR can achieve an up to 15 percent reduction in energy usage without triggering any change in picture quality.
PVR is a promising solution because it can achieve energy savings,no matter the device or video quality, without degrading the viewer experience. If applied to the billions of devices and displays worldwide, it could have significant sustainability impacts. InterDigital and Futuresource’s paper examined data from recent Olympics to reveal that audiences of the Paris 2024 Olympics consumed more than 28 billion hours of video content, which generated roughly 602.8 megatons of CO2. If InterDigital’s PVR technology were applied to devices showing the recent Paris Olympics, roughly 48 million kWh of energy could have been saved, which is the equivalent of fueling 4,000 US homes for a year.
The path to sustainability will be challenging as audience demands for higher quality content and higher resolution displays, and immersive experiences grows, but small solutions like PVR implemented at scale can achieve meaningful energy savings as we work towards a greener future.