Where can I host an 8K showreel?
Somewhere that never re-encodes it.

The first thing is whether the host alters the file. That one is solvable, and the solution is a host with no encode step. uncompressed.io stores the file you upload and hands the player those same bytes. There is no adaptive ladder, no rendition list and no lower version standing by, so nothing on our side imposes a resolution ceiling or a bitrate ceiling. An 8K HEVC or AV1 master is served exactly as you exported it. The one real limit in the upload path is 50 GB per file, and it is checked in the browser before the transfer begins rather than discovered an hour in.

The second thing is whether the viewer’s machine can decode 8K, and no host on earth solves that. 8K plays when the viewer’s hardware decodes it. Every sentence on this page carries that caveat, because a file streaming untouched from our side says nothing about what the machine at the other end can do with it.

Decoding 8K is work done by the recipient’s machine. A host can guarantee that the bytes leaving its storage are the bytes you uploaded. It cannot guarantee that a laptop, a phone or a five-year-old workstation has a decoder for the codec, the profile and the frame size you chose. Those are separate questions and they are answered by hardware.

The best published evidence of how narrow above-4K support is comes from Vimeo, not from us. Its article on watching above 4K lists Safari 11 and up and Edge 15 and up with supported hardware, macOS 10.13 High Sierra and Windows 10, and states that mobile devices on iOS and Android, including the Vimeo app and mobile browsers, do not support playback above 4K. Vimeo is not being restrictive there. It is describing the device population, and every host, ours included, faces the same population.

Vimeo publishes its playback ladder: 240p, 360p, 540p, 720p, 1080p at 60fps, 2K and 4K. Its own wording is that the bitrates listed for each resolution are a maximum, and that a video could transcode at a lower bitrate depending on the complexity of the image. Above 4K, Vimeo states that videos are delivered using the HEVC codec, and that it will only generate a 5K to 8K transcode if the creator uploaded the video as an HDR video with greater than 5K resolution. Read that as the condition it is. An 8K SDR reel, which is what most 8K reels are, does not meet it. Two other Vimeo behaviours matter to a reel specifically: footage above 60 fps has its frame rate automatically reduced, and all uploads are converted to square pixels.

YouTube is direct about the mechanism. Its help centre states that YouTube always re-encodes videos to optimize their playback quality. It lists 4320p at 7680 by 4320 among its recommended 16:9 resolutions, and separately states that in 2022 it started removing support for playback at resolutions between 4K and 8K. Nothing on the pages fetched for this guide states what an 8K upload is delivered at today. For a reel there are three further published facts worth knowing: YouTube’s Terms grant it the right to monetize your content, its help centre says ads may appear on videos in channels not in the Partner Program, related videos cannot be disabled in the embedded player, and an unlisted video can be reshared by anyone who has the link.

We publish one hard number, so it deserves arithmetic rather than reassurance. The runtime 50 GB buys depends entirely on the data rate you finished at, and that rate is a choice you make in your export dialog. We impose no bitrate ceiling and recommend no 8K rate.

A showreel runs one to three minutes. At every rate in that table, a reel fits many times over, which is the practical point: for this use case the 50 GB ceiling is irrelevant. It becomes real on long-form 8K work, and the category view of that trade lives on our 8K video hosting guide, which covers what each platform does with a long 8K master rather than with a reel.

When 8K is genuinely right, it is right for a specific reason: the reel is going to a colourist, a post supervisor or a client with a large display and a machine chosen for the job, and the whole point of the send is that they see the resolution and the grade you actually finished. In that case the thing you need from a host is that it changes nothing, and that it does not decide on your behalf which rendition the viewer receives.

An 8K reel is a large file that a small number of important people watch, which is exactly the shape a bandwidth meter punishes. Here, storage is the only meter. The Terms state that the exact file you upload is the file your viewers receive, that there are no bandwidth caps, and that streaming is unlimited on every plan within that plan’s storage allowance. The pricing page adds that external client viewers do not require a paid team seat. A reel that thirty producers open costs the same as one nobody opens.

The ladder is short. Starter is free with 5 GB of hot storage and one film at a time, which is enough to host a single 8K reel and test the whole chain. Lite is $9 a month or $90 a year for 100 GB. Pro is $25 or $250 for 500 GB. Max is $75 or $750 for 1.5 TB hot plus 1 TB cold. Studio is $250 or $2,500 for 2 TB hot plus 2 TB cold. Beyond a plan, storage blocks are $40 per TB of hot storage a month and $20 per TB of cold. If you are building a page of films rather than sending a single reel, the layout and branding side of that is covered in video portfolio hosting for filmmakers.