But we had music piracy before 1mbps , only limited. And we had video torrents at before 10mbps(and at low quality), so those use cases we're clear, and we could have guesses that maybe legal versions of those activities will also appear.
But currently the limits are more tied to physiological limits - the highest bandwidth channel for a human is the eyes and we know their limits (somewhere between 1080p to 4K depending on various things), and we've almost covered that.
The only open question is VR streaming, but i wonder whether this work considering the extreme low latency required ?
> But we had music piracy before 1mbps , only limited.
Quality has a quality all its own. Music piracy in the era of Old Napster (before they went legitimate) was terrible. Horrible mislabeled MP3s at a bitrate best described as "wax cylinder quality" with no album artwork or other extras buying a CD would provide. Plus, of course, you were stuck behind dial-up, and even poor-quality MP3s go at about a megabyte of data per minute of music, so you were looking at substantial download times over unreliable connections for anything approaching a full album.
It was wonderful only in that it worked at all, and that it had music record stores wouldn't touch, at least not if you were out in the boonies. It was one of the few pre-YouTube channels for obscure and out-of-print music. However, that didn't make it convenient in any absolute sense, and it was usually only high-quality compared to not having the music at all.
These days, with most torrent software, you can download a whole discography, in high-quality FLAC with full album images and so on, well-organized and correctly labeled, simply by copying-and-pasting a magnet link. Multiple megabyte downloads go by in seconds. The difference in the experiences is night and day.
The music industry got angry at Old Napster. They're being crushed by Bittorrent.
Sure there we're definitely improvements in music quality.And sure 1mbps wasn't enough , But it was easy to forecast demand for bandwidth - it's reasonable that people will want higher quality music, we had decent guesses what's the maximum bandwidth that would require , and the amount of music people listened to stayed about the same - i.e. a lot.
But sure, BitTorrent definitely had a bigger impact on the music industry.
>But currently the limits are more tied to physiological limits - the highest bandwidth channel for a human is the eyes and we know their limits (somewhere between 1080p to 4K depending on various things), and we've almost covered that.
This goes counter to my experience and thinking. I am sure that this is true on a phone form factor but 8k TV is definitely better than 4k on a 60"+ screen (I've never seen them side by side on a smaller device and I am unsure how big the demo set up was).
Current 4k has limited colour capability, ramping up the stage to richer pallets will increase the bandwidth demand, as will high frame rates and the increase in resolution to 8k.
VR streaming is interesting but I guess that filming it will be a big challenge !
But if we only talk about resolution , 4K reaches the limits of the eye at around 1.1 meter [1], and most people sit farther than that from their tv.
But usually at display demos , they let you sit closer to the tv , this and other factors (compression, placebo, framerate , maybe brightness , etc etc ) might help create better experiences or illusions/salesmanship with 8K.
Another option is for rare few maybe the retina limit is higher .
But currently the limits are more tied to physiological limits - the highest bandwidth channel for a human is the eyes and we know their limits (somewhere between 1080p to 4K depending on various things), and we've almost covered that.
The only open question is VR streaming, but i wonder whether this work considering the extreme low latency required ?