By Phillip Swann
The TV Answer Man –Follow me on X.

Two elderly men are eating at a neighborhood diner. The first man says:

‘The food here is terrible!’

The second man turns to him and says:

‘Yeah, and such small portions!’

Folks, this is the state of 4K TV in the United States, at least as far as it concerns live sports if not the entire industry. Why do I say that?

Live sports in 4K, whether it’s done by Fox, ESPN, NBC or a regional sports network, does not look great because it’s not really 4K. It’s an upscaled 4K picture from a 1080p HD production. While the picture is sometimes better than a normal high-def image, it’s sometimes terrible like the food in the diner despite the best work of talented network technicians doing the upscale. You simply can’t produce the detailed resolution of a real 4K picture from a HD display and the attempt to simulate it often goes awry, making the picture, well, terrible.

The networks prefer doing the upscaled 4K over ‘native 4K’ because it’s cheaper to produce. Although they know that upscaling is far inferior to native 4K, and sometimes leads to a subpar picture, they still do it because it enables them to say an event is available in 4K. The hope here is that the 4K TV owners won’t know the difference and will watch anyway. (The one exception is NESN, the regional TV home of the Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins. NESN does native 4K, which means the production is done in 4K and transmitted to the home in 4K. If more networks did native 4K, which looks fantastic in most productions, I believe that more people would watch live sports in 4K. A lot more people.)

And to make matters worse, the portions are so small! The networks do relatively few live sporting events in 4K, ahem, upscaled 4K. Again, money is the reason. Although scores of millions of Americans own 4K TVs, the networks see little financial incentive in providing more broadcasts in 4K, ahem, upscaled 4K. There’s no advertising or ratings incentive. And to make matters even worse, there are only a handful of national networks that do anything in 4K, leaving the 4K TV owner constantly guessing whether an event will be available in the format, or whether any event will be available in the format. On most days, there’s not a single national broadcast available in even upscaled 4K.

I am talking here about live sports, but you could make a similar argument for non-sports in 4K. While streamers such as Max and Netflix provide a decent selection of shows and movies in 4K, the picture is not as good as it should be. Streaming simply can’t deliver the best possible image. If you want the best 4K picture — the one we were all promised years ago when TV makers began selling these things — you’ll have to get a 4K Blu-ray version of that program. And even then, some discs are better produced than others, leaving the viewer guessing again what kind of picture he or she will get.

The cumulative effect of all this nonsense is that most 4K TV owners watch very little that’s actually in 4K although they paid several hundred dollars for the privilege of owning a 4K TV.

Which leaves me to declare that 4K TV is dead.

Have a question about new TV technologies? Send it to The TV Answer Man at swann@tvanswerman.com Please include your first name and hometown in your message.

The TV Answer Man is veteran journalist Phillip Swann who has covered the TV technology scene for more than three decades. He will report on the latest news and answer your questions regarding new devices and services that are changing the way you watch television. See the bio for Phillip Swann here.