Fun With Data – 8K
8K TVs are a difficult sell to consumers and rightly so as there is little 8K content that would allow consumers to take advantage of the increase in resolution that 8K TV sets provide. However each year TV brands offer the public 8K sets, promising that they will be able to watch their favorite 4K (or less) programs using the upscalers built into 8K sets, while waiting for the world to catch up to 8K broadcast and content standards. The problem is that by the time there is enough 8K content to make a difference to TV purists, the 8K set you just purchased will be either outdated or unable to display the then current content, which would cause considerable consternation from past purchasers.
There are lots of reasons why 8K broadcast content is not available (other than in Japan in limited quantities), but the bottom line is cost for broadcasters and bandwidth for streaming services, so unless you are satisfied with watching a few travelogues and animals in the wild, 8K TV set purchases should be put on the back burner. We have watched a continual decline in 8K set unit volume estimates over the last year, although brands themselves don’t seem willing to make an estimates of where the 8K TV set market will be over the next few years, so we have put together an aggregation of those estimates we have found, excluding those that we know have been updated during recent reality checks. We note that assuming a steady-state 220m TV sets sold each year shows that even the most aggressive estimates in 2025 show a penetration rate below 2%, so we would not be expecting TV brands to be adding significant 8K capacity, other than as demo units or for sales to China where 8K seems to be growing the fastest, but with Samsun owning some 65% of the 8K TV market recently, there js little left for others and producing such 8K sets in small quantities is a costly process. Here are the aggregated estimates:
There are lots of reasons why 8K broadcast content is not available (other than in Japan in limited quantities), but the bottom line is cost for broadcasters and bandwidth for streaming services, so unless you are satisfied with watching a few travelogues and animals in the wild, 8K TV set purchases should be put on the back burner. We have watched a continual decline in 8K set unit volume estimates over the last year, although brands themselves don’t seem willing to make an estimates of where the 8K TV set market will be over the next few years, so we have put together an aggregation of those estimates we have found, excluding those that we know have been updated during recent reality checks. We note that assuming a steady-state 220m TV sets sold each year shows that even the most aggressive estimates in 2025 show a penetration rate below 2%, so we would not be expecting TV brands to be adding significant 8K capacity, other than as demo units or for sales to China where 8K seems to be growing the fastest, but with Samsun owning some 65% of the 8K TV market recently, there js little left for others and producing such 8K sets in small quantities is a costly process. Here are the aggregated estimates:
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