Ultra HD TV: Not Ready for Primetime Now, the TV

Ultra HD TV: Not Ready for Primetime

Now, the TV business finds itself the hunted. Its own audience is being torn away by fast and nimble new predators: mobile devices and Web video. The popularity of mobile has transformed the entertainment landscape as quickly and profoundly as TV did in the 1940s and ’50s, and the TV industry is feeling the pressure to quicken its pace of innovation, just as the movies did, lest its networks, affiliates and cablers go the way of single-screen neighborhood movie theaters.

So less than five years since the digital transition in the U.S., which abandoned the standard definition format that had stood for 50 years in favor of HDTV, TV manufacturers are back with another upgrade: “Ultra High-Definition.” As UHD sets begin to appear in retail stores at less-than-astronomical prices, the latest models also will be a featured attraction at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Jan. 7-10. Sony Electronics in particular plans to make the technology a focal point of its presentation, perhaps the first of many announcements out of Las Vegas aiming to jumpstart the UHD category. Panasonic, LG, Samsung, Toshiba and Sharp won’t be far behind.

The Intl. Telecommunications Union has published the standards road map for UHD, Rec. 2020, which includes all those enhancements, but few of them have actually been implemented in the first-generation 4K TVs; some of those standards are likely to become obsolete as more of those improvements are introduced. For example, Dolby Labs has already proposed a format that goes beyond Rec. 2020 in terms of brighter whites and colors, as well as much greater contrast ratio

Bandwidth limits kept “HD”-branded TV channels from even using the 1080p “Full HD” format used on Blu-ray disks; broadcasters and cablers use either 1080i or 720p.

But in fact, those companies seem unfazed by the prospect of a UHD transition, in part because a new standard is already in place that should let them send UHD over their existing channels: The High Efficiency Video Coding standard, also known as H.265, which was formally approved and published in 2013. HEVC uses several improvements in compression and takes advantage of increased computing power in broadcast encoders. Before it can be widely used, though, HEVC video decoders must be built into the chips that would be placed inside set-top boxes, TVs
and other devices. Those chips aren’t available yet, but they likely will be by the end of 2014. That’s when UHD devices should start to proliferate, and cablers can offer UHD channels.

http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/ultra-hd...201029515/

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