Fighting Talk: Why the hell should I pay more for 4K?

Don't push 4K down the road of irrelevance

It recently emerged that Netflix, the streaming company so famous that even old people are aware of it and planning on asking a grandchild how to get it on their 1989 Sony BRAVIAs, wants new subscribers to pay more for access to 4K streams.

We also recently saw the launch of Tidal Music, a Spotify-battling service that offers 'HiFi' quality music, delivering 1411kbps, 44.1 kHz/16-bit FLAC and ALAC streams. The cost of this? £20/$20 per month.

We've already, as one great human collective, decided that 3D is rubbish technology that adds nothing to the experience of watching endless reboots, and we don't want it. We came together. The planet said 3D was too clumsy and expensive and we've got enough plastic crap in the lounge already without the need for special TV-watching glasses as well.

A few people who bought 3D TVs three years ago will tell you otherwise, but it's gone. If we're made to pay more for 4K, and if it's positioned as a premium product only good enough for the immense TVs and unlimited fibre pipes of the super-rich, it risks going the same way.

The mainstream man, in his mainstream lounge, watching his mainstream content with one eye and updating Facebook on his mobile phone with the other, already finds it hard to tell much of a difference between upscaled SD content and HD terrestrial TV.

The jump to 4K will no doubt be welcomed by the sort of enthusiast who kneels in front of the TV with a calculator and magnifying glass to make sure he's not being short-changed in terms of how many pixels he's getting, but will the average consumer, already used to watching upscaled content from numerous sources on 7-inch tablet displays, care about 4K?

Probably, yes, if it's free, easy to access and becomes a bullet point to boast about. Perhaps then. But if the streaming companies think there's enough enthusiasm for 4K that it can be sold as a premium product, they're wrong, and pushing it down the same road to irrelevance as the most recent 3D blip.

The same goes for lossless music streaming. The average music lover is actually quite happy with Spotify's 320kbps thank you very much. They don't feel like their ears are being "punished" so why would they pony up twice as much per month just so Jeff Buckley sounds a bit more defined?

Don't get me wrong: Tidal is an excellent service that offers a stunning sound - it's just a shame that so many people won't experience it at this price.

Making people pay more for the best quality of something digital stinks of the sort of greedy tactics that caused the music industry to explode amid a storm of negativity and recrimination.

Yes, Netflix and Tidal have to make money somehow and we assume it's quite expensive to host 4K videos/CD-quality tunes and bung them out to thousands of people at the same time, but that's not our problem to solve. Moore's Law should mean it's half the price to buy new servers that it was 18 months ago, so that must help.

4K is still a new technology. It needs to get inside people's houses, build up user numbers and prove its worth before it becomes a thing that's worth extra money.

Why punish the early adopters again? The poor suckers who spent a stupid amount on additional pairs of 3D glasses for their living room TVs need reassuring that their next TV isn't going to be another expensive black elephant, like the 3D sets of a few of years ago.

4K content is niche, 'HiFi' quality music is perceived by many as unnecessary. They have a chance to flourish, but tell people they're more expensive and you only risk killing them off more quickly.

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Fighting talk: The Microsoft Band is what Apple's Watch should have been…

It's style vs substance

Microsoft pulled a Microsoft this week, by announcing what appeared to be another too-late, competition-cloning, 'me-too' product for no one, in the form of the Microsoft Band health wearable.

The thing is, though, even though it's an easy target, Microsoft is attempting to do a lot more here than Apple's trying with its more glamorous Watch.

For a start, Microsoft Band is open. There's a Microsoft Health app for it already up on the Google Play shop and in Apple's App Store, for example, which means that it's not just for the Windows Phone hardcore. That's a brave decision, although one that makes pretty clear sense given the massive difference between Android/iPhone and Windows Phone user numbers.

A health band exclusively sold to Windows Phone users would sell in numbers so low analysts would be issuing sales forecasts counting quarterly shipped units by the dozen.

But there's more to get excited about than cross-platform appeal. The Band is stacked with sensors. Sure, the health wearable world is built mainly on lies and marketing, as there's pretty much zero use in knowing what your heart rate is at any given moment, not unless you're a professional athlete training to within an inch of your life each day.

And the calculation of calories burnt by counting steps is something overweight people have been doing in their heads since the 1970s, so it hardly worth spending £200 on a watch to do that for you.

People have been able to successfully manually track their sleep by simply remembering how well they slept the following morning; no one needs a gadget to tell them they woke up twice during the night and maybe got a bit a hot and kicked the duvet off in annoyance. If that happened, you know it happened… because it happened. Not everything needs a notification.

At least Microsoft is trying to do more than clone Fitbit. The Band has a built-in UV monitor that might be of some use to more UV-sensitive types venturing out for a run for the first time. It lets you reply to text messages via short auto-replies, and even contains a galvanic skin response sensor that can, allegedly, measure the stress of the wearer.

Stress tests are likely to be another infrequently used guestimator, but still it's something new and interesting, and a shot at doing more than just the usual heart-beat-counting stuff and offering on-wrist notifications.

And in more good news for anyone who's struggling to keep all their wearables and pocketables charged, Microsoft says the Band hardware should be good for two days of normal use.

And that one's the killer. Apple suggests its Watch will need charging every day, so although you get a flashier screen and OS, having half the usable uptime is going to make Apple's first wearable much more of a burden.

The Band screen is smaller and it doesn't do as much as the full-on smartwatches, of course, and you won't look as obviously minted as if you were wearing a thing with an Apple logo on it, but it'll work for two entire days. For that alone Microsoft's engineers deserve some credit.

Apple and Google's wearables are sure to have more fans, greater sales and higher levels of general enthusiasm surrounding them, but Band seems to show Microsoft can mix it with its more fashionable and younger competitors – and could one day come up with some hardware that's actually popular and genuinely innovative.

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