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The UHD Forum spelt out its roadmap at the recent IBC 2015 broadcasting convention in Amsterdam and indicated how it will work with its sister body the UHD Alliance to shape the future of immersive television. There was an indication that the two groups would eventually converge into one after pursuing their parallel agendas separately for the time being. But there was also a whiff of tension even among UHD Forum members with some clear disagreements over the exact form of emerging profiles for UHD.
Traditional linear playout and viewing on-demand has evolved more quickly than many expected into the concept of ‘content everywhere’ via smart TVs, tablets, smart phones and PCs, at least in digitally maturing markets. To keep up with the pace of this consumer behaviour, broadcasters need to have a number of key processes in place including multi-site, multi-format (4K is becoming a reality now), multi-platform delivery, and increasingly media business reporting. In turn, MAM systems have evolved to manage users as well as large amounts of content and related media and data such as audio languages, subtitles and all the additional metadata, images and attachments needed for non-linear distribution.
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 Electro-mechanics has been replaced by chips and buffers with settings.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.
In a KVM system, the letter V – short for video – plays the most important role because it is the only component that is visible when transmitting and switching signals. The migration from analogue to digital image signals constituted a major challenge for KVM: higher resolutions require higher data rates. However, the bandwidth of cable infrastructures, especially when using CAT cables, is extremely limited. Here, signals cannot be transmitted without being compressed. For the benefit of their customers, Guntermann & Drunck (G&D) rely on their proprietary compression technology.
While most traditional broadcasters see the distribution of 4K video far into the future, Internet companies see the transmission of flawless 4K a priority facing them today. That’s why seven major companies formed the Alliance for Open Media this month to take on the current HEVC/H.265 standard.
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?
