DVD in 1996, Blu-ray in 2006, UHD Blu-ray in 2016. Ten years apart each time, tidy enough that you could set a calendar by it, so 2026 was supposed to hand us the next one. Instead the Blu-ray Disc Association is on record saying it is not developing an 8K format. That is not a delay, that is the cycle quietly ending, and I think it ends in the right place.
What is strange is that the current spec does not feel like something running out of room. Triple-layer 100GB discs, a 128 Mbps video ceiling, 10-bit, Rec.2020, lossless object audio. Almost nothing ships anywhere near that bitrate ceiling. The limit on how a disc looks in my room stopped being the disc years ago and became the master, the grade, and whether anyone paid for a fresh scan. Plenty of catalogue 4K discs I own are finished from a 2K DI, and no extra pixels on the platter fix that.
Then there is the supply side. Broadcast 8K exists in Japan and there are one-off sports experiments, but there is no film production chain running end to end at 8K, no player, and no studio itching to remaster the same eight titles again. A new physical format needs all three to appear at once, and the last time that happened the industry had a console maker willing to eat the cost of the drive.
So a genuine question for the disc people here: what would you actually put on an 8K disc that is not an upscale? I can name maybe a dozen films finished high enough to justify it, and I doubt any of them are ones people would rebuy.
What is strange is that the current spec does not feel like something running out of room. Triple-layer 100GB discs, a 128 Mbps video ceiling, 10-bit, Rec.2020, lossless object audio. Almost nothing ships anywhere near that bitrate ceiling. The limit on how a disc looks in my room stopped being the disc years ago and became the master, the grade, and whether anyone paid for a fresh scan. Plenty of catalogue 4K discs I own are finished from a 2K DI, and no extra pixels on the platter fix that.
Then there is the supply side. Broadcast 8K exists in Japan and there are one-off sports experiments, but there is no film production chain running end to end at 8K, no player, and no studio itching to remaster the same eight titles again. A new physical format needs all three to appear at once, and the last time that happened the industry had a console maker willing to eat the cost of the drive.
So a genuine question for the disc people here: what would you actually put on an 8K disc that is not an upscale? I can name maybe a dozen films finished high enough to justify it, and I doubt any of them are ones people would rebuy.
