4K TV: A Technology Push or a Demand Pull?
by Elisabeth Tweedie
London, UK, Spetember 6, 2013-- At IBC this year, 53 of the approximately 1400 exhibitors claim to be showing something to do with 4K. My guess is that the number is actually higher as many companies don’t list everything that they will be demonstrating in advance. So does this mean that 4K is destined to become a commercial reality?
Following so closely on the heels of 3D it is not surprising that the publicity surrounding 4K is considerably less exuberant than that which accompanied 3D. Nevertheless the same question needs to be answered: “Is this a technology push or a demand pull?” To answer that question we need to look at some of the issues and what has been happening recently.
Eutelsat launched Europe’s first 4K channel on Eutelsat 10A at the beginning of this year. It uses MPEG-4 and is transmitted at 40Mbps. The channel is designed to be a demonstration showcase for 4K to benefit all players who want to acquire expertise in 4K, so it is not delivering “regular” TV content to end users.
At this year’s annual Television Program Market - MIPTV (Marché International des Programmes de Télévision) held in Cannes in April, SES launched its Ultra HD Experience Initiative inviting content providers to work with it to test the “entire HD Value Chain.” A week later during SES Industry Days in Luxembourg working with Harmonic and Broadcom the company gave a live demonstration of Ultra HD using HEVC from an Astra satellite at 19.2 degrees East. The demonstration was broadcast in DVB-S2 at a data rate of 20Mbps so using half the bandwidth of the Eutelsat demonstration.
Elsewhere at MIPTV there were sessions on 4K supported by the BBC, Sky, Sony as well as SES.
Hispasat has also demonstrated 4K delivery in several European countries including Spain and is planning to launch a dedicated demonstration channel shortly. It is also one of the sponsors of a documentary about the Museo de Prado in Spain which will be shot in 4K.
Not to be left out, in June, Intelsat working with Ericsson demonstrated 10 bit 4K at 60 frames per second in the USA. The 100Mbps feed was encoded and decoded by Ericsson and modulated and demodulated by Newtec. Meanwhile in the same month in Asia, Measat also working with Ericsson demonstrated 4K.
On the content provider side, Sky Deutschland – part of News Corp. already has an ongoing UHDTV project and in the USA Phil Goswitz of Directv announced a year ago that his company was planning to replace all SD transmissions with Ultra HD by 2016.
So, certainly on the satellite side plenty of interest in the distribution of 4K. What about the other parts of the value chain?
As always the Consumer Electronics manufacturers are keen to market anything new and with TV replacement cycles now at six to eight years the market potential is there as the first HD screens are ready for replacement and prices are dropping on 4K sets. However given the disillusionment with 3D there is also more wariness on the part of the consumer. This caution is also being fueled by the current lack of content. The old chicken and egg situation – understandably the content creators are reluctant to invest in the infrastructure needed to shoot and process 4K which is at least an order of magnitude more expensive, when there are so few screens out there on which to view it. This may change with the next FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup to be held next year and the 2016 Olympics, but the 240 hours of 3D footage of the 2012 Olympics didn’t do much for 3D in general so this is not guaranteed. There seems to be general consensus that upconverted content doesn’t make for a compelling viewing experience.
There is also the issue of longevity of the current sets Michael Zoeller, Senior Director Euopean Sales and Marketing for Samsung has been quoted as saying “no UHD TV today will be compatible with UHD standards to come.”
The viewing experience is of course another critical issue – with even the most enthusiastic broadcast engineers admitting that it is hard to discern the difference between 1080p and 4K on screens of less than 60” diagonal. There are a limited number of living rooms in Europe that can accommodate that size of screen. However to truly appreciate 4K the layout of the living room needs to change. With HD (1080p or i) the ideal viewing position is at a distance of three times the screen height and within a 30 degree angle, with 4K the this changes to 1.5 times the screen height and a 55 degree angle. This makes it a much more immersive experience, but is that compatible with the increased use of the second screen while viewing the first?
Andrew Cotton, Principal Technologist at the BBC, believes that for many viewers the quantum leap in the viewing experience will come when higher frame rates of 100 frames per second (fps) are used. This will be particularly relevant to fast sports and action movies. Currently most 4K is using 30 fps whereas “true” 4K is defined as 60fps. Ericsson is one of the few companies already using 60fps in its encoding equipment, however the current High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) standard does not support 60fps so there is no consumer equipment to play this on. This should change when HDMI 2.0 is issued later this year. Another issue with speed has been raised by Andrew Cotton who believes that for the European Broadcasters using 50MHz the fps for 4K needs to be based on multiples of 50 in order to avoid judder when being viewed on HD TV sets.
Integral to the commercial success of 4K is a significant improvement in current compression standards. Somewhat confusingly 4K at 8.3 Megapixels (3840x2160) has approximately four times the number of pixels as 2K (1920x1080) the current HD standard. Meaning that using the current compression standard H.264 (otherwise known as MPEG-4), 4K would need to be transmitted at approximately 48Mbps as opposed to the 12Mbps used for 2K. Given the current demands on bandwidth a fourfold increase per “item” is never going to be commercially viable. Enter H.265 or High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). This codec was agreed by ITU members in January of this year and should result in at least a 50% improvement reducing that 48Mbps to 24Mbps at the most, although some estimates consider that the actual savings will be even greater. The current standard supports 8 and 10-bit video and work is continuing on 12-bit video and additional chroma formats.
As always with new technology there is no shortage of working groups aiming to agree on standards and promote the technology. In Europe the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will be hosting “Voices and Choices” in Geneva this November; with the aim of finding agreement around the detailed technical parameters for UHDTV including: resolution, frame rates, dynamic range and color spaces. In the UK the Digital TV Group (DTG) has recently launched the UK UHD Forum, co-chaired by Andy Quested, Head of Technology for BBC and Chris Johns, Chief Engineer, Broadcast Strategy at BSkyB. The Forum will coordinate UK requirements for the future interoperability of UHD and will work with the Forum for Advanced Media in Europe (FAME), broadcasters and the Digital Production Partnership.
In the USA, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has established a Ultra HD working group to define the core characteristics of Ultra High Definition equipment for the home. One of its first actions was to decide that 4K would now be known as “Ultra HD.”
For HEVC the ITU/ISO/IEC Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) (formerly JVT) is continuing to work on a range of extensions to HEVC, including support for 12-bit video as well as 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma formats. Also included is the progression of HEVC towards scalable video coding.
So to go back to the original question: Technology Push or Demand Pull? Right now we’re clearly still in the technology push stage. HD was in that stage for nearly twenty years before it became a commercial reality. If it’s going happen 4K or Ultra HD won’t take that long – if for no other reason than the fact that 8K is already lurking in the wings; but also because TV replacement cycles are now much shorter. So if the consumer believes in the product the demand will manifest itself in the next few years. Given that the first major content push is likely to be the FIFA World Cup next year – something that has a far greater following in Europe than North America – this time it may be Europe that leads the way forward.
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Elisabeth Tweedie has over 20 years experience at the cutting edge of new communication and entertainment technologies. She is the Associate Editor of the Satellite Executive Briefing magazine. She can be reached at: elisabeth@satellitemarkets.com
