It's fairly clear at this point that nobody can afford 4K Ultra HD Television sets just yet, but Sony's already making way for them to enter your living room via the PlayStation 4.
Last month, Sony announced that it's developing a distribution service for 4K Ultra HD videos, but it was only recently that the company seemed to suggest it would be running on PlayStation 4 hardware.
In an interview with The Verge, Sony Electronics President and COO Phil Molyneux was asked about the possibility of downloading 4K videos on the PS4, and his answer was essentially a confirmation.
"I promise you will not be disappointed," he said.
Sony has already confirmed that PlayStation 4 games won't have 4K Ultra HD capability, but allowing PS4 users to watch might tempt them to look into 4K TVs. That is, if they can even afford one. The price for a 4K TV ranges anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000, placing the products firmly within the reach of only the extremely rich. The PS4 isn't likely to be cheap, either, so all in all, potential customers would need to have a hefty dose of cash to unload for the service.
Price aside, the fact that so few products are optimized for Ultra HD means that even if you own one, its use would be limited. Sony is trying to change that by getting the jump on video distribution models, but even that poses some difficult problems.
According to Molyneux, 4K video files will be upwards of 100GB large. Any Internet user could tell you that is a huge file size that will take forever to download (with the possible exception of those living in South Korea), so Sony will likely have to resort to allowing users to download files overnight.
There are some "challenges that we have to work through ... we've got some very good ideas that will make that a comfortable consumer experience," said Molyneux.
