Good riddance.

AFAIK, REC 701 was introduced mostly to meet the very limited color gamut that most LCDs are capable of displaying. REC 601, the legacy from the CRT era, was using a somewhat larget color gamut. And CRTs delivered a better static contrast then LCDs, so I wonder why they bash CRTs in the article, while they should bash LCDs.

It sure would be good if a wider gamut was used with displays (like OLEDs) that can actually display a wider gamut.

But better don't hold your breath: It took years until LCDs obsoleted CRTs enough to have media producers react on the new situation. And it will take years before the restrictions of the "LCD era" will be removed for the sake of more advanced displays.

Also, I would not over estimate the public perception of such an improvement: So many people cannot tell 1080p from 720p, so many people like unrealistic low FPS better than more realistic high FPS material, so many people hardly notice the lack of static contrast in contemporary LCDs - I would be surprised if they could turn REC 2020 into a marketing argument that works.

Mitsubishi Electric showed panel prototype with 98% coverage of Rec. 2020 color space

I wonder why the slide on observer metamerism does not mention human tetrachromacy as another contributing factor.

Some paper on issue

Wide color gamut media are emerging, and observer metamerism is more and more concerned. We carried out the experiment on two different media involving color matching using real images to investigate how serious observer metamerism would be under a practical viewing condition. One media was a LCD monitor, and the other media was a laser projector. 30 observers participated in the experiment, and the data from 28 observers were analyzed. Under the viewing condition where images were widely separated (often the case in reality), the lightness discrimination was significantly decreased. It led to our decision to ignore the variability in the lightness direction when computing perceived color differences. The obtained interobserver variability was larger than intra-observer variability for all the three images. The inter-observer variability was 3.2 to 4.4 in MCDM (∆E00, a∗ b∗), which indicates observer metamerism would be significantly apparent when a laser projector is viewed together with conventional media. Image impression could be perceived in a opposite way (a person may see an image as ’warm’ whereas another person may see it as ’cool’). It was found that effective visual angle (or field size) is dependent on image contents. The more complex an image is, the smaller the effective visual angle is. Solutions should be provided for observer metamerism in wide color gamut media, such as color management personalization.

http://www.cis.rit.edu/~yxa8513/Publications/Paper_CIC2014.pdf

Here in Australia rec709 will be in use for the foreseeable future as there are no plans to change the broadcast specification. It will be a very long time before we see a major change in the broadcast industry. Web delivery is where the future lies and hopefully we will see rec2020 implemented fairly quickly.