4K won't happen for a long time, if ever, for consumer consumption. There is not any demand for it. HD is simple "good enough." We learned this lesson with audio, all high end audio formats have failed miserably as far as consumer delivery. 4K does have value as a public display format, theaters, churches, maybe even high end sports bars with large screens. This may be an attempt by Youtube to get into that market, we'll see but I can assure you that the masses could really care less and they certainly aren't willing to pay for it.



ash =o)

All I see is a huge gimmick. My only case study where this situation would work is with people that want to rent a 4K movie then watch it streaming via (Google) gigabit.

There in lies another problem for this: 4K is meant to be experienced uncompressed (or with single digit to 1 compression, AKA Cineform or HDCAM SR.) H.264 or WebM at the moment don't belong in the 4K realm at meer bitrates of 5-10Mbps.