Content owners would love for people to have adopted DRM as standard way back when VCRs first came out. Higher-resolution is just the carrot they are using to get consumers to adopt their DRM standards.

It's because the rights holders in Japan (of whom many are broadcasters) have broadcasters by the balls and demand it and the Japanese Government goes along with it. In particular it's music labels, but various sporting events also make explicits of it. HD broadcasts in Japan (including free to air terrestrial) are encrypted with B-CAS, something that has been broken a few times over many years now. The 4k/8k transmissions over satellite have a new system called A-CAS that instead of being smart card based, is an ASIC in device that apparently receives keys and firmware out of band from the video mux. Now these kinds of systems have been the status quo in that market for over a decade, any new format coming along will most certainly have to implement _some_ form of conditional access. At least until the value of the content on it makes a minority stake on the balance sheets.

I'm honestly not sure what the DRM situation is on 4K blu-rays—I don't own an "official" 4K blu-ray player—but it should be noted their efforts amounted to basically nothing. With the right drive, you can rip 4K BluRays easily. I know because I have done it.

Consumers need to speak with their wallets if they want to impact change in this arena.

That isn’t quite fair.

Consumers aren’t told about DRM. The spec sheets don’t speak about what restrictions are in place. You only discover after the purchase that some capability you had assumed you could do no exists.

E.g. for me I’ve had this twice. Trying to view an HD movie over a component cable—nope not allowed. And second my daughter discovering she can’t use music from a streaming music service in a home video. Both occurred well after initial purchases.

"my daughter discovering she can’t use music from a streaming music service in a home video"

Can you say more about where the DRM applied in this case? I would expect it to kick in, say, if you upload a home video to YouTube that incorporates copyrighted media, but I would be surprised if something prevented you from making a video (say on your phone) that included whatever music playing over speakers.

I imagine the OP was more referring to trying to whip something up quickly in iMovie (or similar). If you own the track, this is trivial. If you're used to Spotify, not so much.

As if consumers were given any choice in the matter.