Intel announced its membership in the Alliance for Open Media. And with that, we reinforce our commitment to open formats and announce our efforts for delivering the next generation of video coding tools. With founding partners Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, the Alliance for Open Media is collaborating to develop the next generation video formats that will reduce the end user cost of video delivery by being optimized for the next generation processors. Video is critically important to Intel’s business. Our customers are under constant pressure to improve video coding efficiency – whether to overcome the infrastructure challenges of the next 100M smartphones in India, or the difficulty of fitting 4K BT.2020 into legacy cables, we need technologies like HEVC to enable the next generation, and we will need to continue evolution in the generation beyond. To provide some insight into the recent history of broadcast video formats, let’s consider what broadcast video really means.
The few remaining moving parts in television stations other than automated studio cameras are fans, pumps and disk drives. Electro-mechanics has been replaced by chips and buffers with settings. Maintenance engineers need a new tool box.
Seven Internet giants have joined forces to build an open source codec to challenge HEVC for compressing high definition video content and especially Ultra HD (UHD) or 4K. The new Open Media Alliance Source project has the stated intention of developing “next-generation media formats, codecs and technologies” but the subtext is to oust HEVC as the codec for emerging UHD services, particularly on desktop PCs and laptops, although with growing convergence mobile and even broadcast platforms will also be targets.
Many industry commentators seem to consider a pure cloud delivery model to be broadcasting nirvana and that hybrid/cloud solutions are simply a rung on the ladder leading to the cloud. But, what if one size doesn’t fit all?
The 2015 Arris Consumer Entertainment Index finds that nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of global consumers have issues with Wi-Fi in the home — a likely consequence of the rapidly increasing number of connected media devices.
Regardless of the business model, supported devices or distribution channels, the success of Internet-delivered television is driven by an age-old truth: content is king, says a new report from Conviva.
The future of TV broadcasting is in the air, but maybe not on the air. FCC repack auctions and ATSC 3.0 introduce new variables further complicating predictions of TV’s future, even with a UHD crystal ball and a good lawyer. A lot of people without call letters want to tell broadcasters what to do. To what destination are TV stations being lead?
Spectrum scarcity is giving TV channels and broadcast operators a real challenge to introduce 4K services for terrestrial television. Combining scalable coding with HEVC and hybrid broadcast/broadband distribution is an answer. In this solution, HDTV transmissions on DTT remains unchanged and an enhancement layer is sent over the internet to allow the TV set or the set top box to decode and display the 4K picture.
