Household penetration of 4K Ultra HDTVs in the United States 2014-2018

As of 2018, around 31 percent of U.S. television households made use of 4K Ultra HDTV products. Since first becoming commercially available in the early 2010s, ultra-high-definition products have transitioned from luxury good to increasingly standard household devices.

Ultra HD

The 4k moniker is used to acknowledge the fact that these displays are built with nearly 4,000 horizontal pixels, and, along with 8k, fall under the category of ultra-high-definition (UHD). These UHD products were initially used almost exclusively in film production but have since found their way into nearly a third of U.S. television households. By the end of 2019 there expected to be around 300 million UHD households around the world, nearly half of which will be located in the Asia Pacific region. In 2018, over 60 percent of all televisions sold in the U.S. contained UHD technology, while the global sales share grew to over 50 percent.

TV households

While the recent success of streaming platforms has limited the success of pay television providers, these new platforms do not seem to have slowed down the sales of televisions themselves. As of 2019 nearly 120 million American households own a television, marking the product’s highest number to date and continuing a trend of decades of expansion.