Color accuracy is a big and complicated topic. Many of the same things below can be said for audio mixing:

Most people aren’t going to be viewing your content on a color accurate device. There are so many smartphones out there with vivid profiles enabled by default and televisions, in particular, have so much post-processing, contrast, sharpening, ‘motion smoothing’ garbage going on already that regardless of what you do colors aren’t going to be accurate to what you graded them as.

Color grading on a device which is not itself color accurate compounds the problem.

• If you color grade on an accurate monitor it’s, hypothetically, ‘100% to your vision’ and looks exactly how you want it to look. Someone might play it on a phone that has low contrast, saturation and especially poor red reproduction and get ‘70%’ of what you expected, someone else might get 80% etc.
• If you color grade on a monitor that isn’t accurate, say a television, now you have to factor in that your ‘vision’ is being tainted by the flaws of the device you’re grading on. You might lower the contrast, saturation and reds to ‘make it look right’ - without realizing that the television has a cool tint and is warping your perspective of the image. Now your exported video ends up being ‘70%’ of what you expected and the person playing it on their phone gets something incredibly muddy with basically no color.

If you know how to read color scopes and monitor the actual color values you’re outputting - you can often get away with it in some circumstances. For instance, I can match a brand color from a style guide to the brand color I’ve used in an animation or color-correct footage by adjusting RGB levels with the scopes or using a calibration card while filming. But it can be hard to do, being able to see what you’re grading is very useful.

But I digress… the main things to focus on are:

Color accurate monitor How many colors does the screen reproduce, coverage of the sRGB colorspace for instance, how much luminance does the screen produce (let’s not get started on HDR…)

Calibration tools / monitor calibration Although monitors are calibrated in the factory, you may need a calibration tool like the SpyderPro to validate that the monitor is outputting what it says it’s outputting.

Environment you’re color grading in Just like the blue/gold/white dress thing that went viral, your brain does internal white-balancing. If you’re sitting in a room lit by warm tungsten lighting, it doesn’t matter how color accurate your monitor is… you might be adjusting everything wrong. Usually color grading takes place in a dimly lit environment (daylight temperature / 5700K) environment. Even when filming this last one can catch people off guard. If you’re outside in the sun you might look at your camera screen and think your footage is too dark, then you get inside and find out it’s too bright and over exposed. Always better to read the scopes on the camera than to trust your eye looking at a screen in direct sunlight.

So thanks for coming to my TED talk I guess… but yeah overall, see if you can pick up a more color accurate monitor, have a look into your television’s settings and see if there’s a way to turn off any of the picture profile stuff it does, sometimes they have an sRGB/computer mode that’s more accurate. But you likely don’t need to go ‘all out’ unless you’re really serious about how consistent your videos look across devices.