Marshall Goldberg is from Lattice Semiconductor, which recently bought Silicon Image, the developer of HDMI and MHL and the owners of the SiBeam wireless technology.
Goldberg went through the history of HDMI from V1.4 at 4K30 in 2009 to SuperMHL in 2014 at 8K120. He also pointed out that the specification for 4k UltraHD on Blu-Ray is now finalised. He agrees with IHS that all new TVs will be UltraHD at 55″ or above by 2018.
Cameras also drive the market by providing UltraHD content. Sales of digital still cameras “died” in the market, but the real market for cameras was on phones and that is a huge market.
Camera sales fell away sharply…
… but have been made up by smartphones which dominate now
Goldberg pointed out that the Sony Xperia phone can support UltraHD with a Sony TV.
USB 2 was a big challenge and he believes that uncompressed video is important – there’s no point in going to UltraHD if you keep compressing and uncompressing the content. Bandwidth demands are increasing all the time and there is talk of a need for more than 208Gbps for high bit depth content at high bit depth.
Subsampling of 4:2:0 and frame rates of 30fps may be the level that 8K finally start to appear, in Goldberg’s view.
Analyst Comment
In discussions with Goldberg about DisplayStream (the VESA ‘light compression’ that is part of SuperMHL) he was clear that he sees this kind of compression as “the thin end of the wedge” and regards uncompressed video as essential. (BR)
