Free Brings UltraHD to Basic Offer
Free is now broadcasting an UltraHD channel in France: Festival 4K, dedicated to music festivals, concerts and similar. Access is included in Free’s basic Freebox package.
Colmbian Pay-TV Enjoys Small Rise
According to Dataxis, the pay-TV market in Colombia will reach 5.8 million households by 2018: a 3.4% rise from end-2015. Households with CATV services will have a 64.8% share of the country’s pay-TV market. Meanwhile, DTH networks will raise their share from 30% in 2015 to 34.9% in 2018. IPTV will grow from a 5.2% … Read more
SMPTE 2015 – Introduction
The SMPTE 2015 Fall Conference is history now, but as usual, it was an information-packed event in Hollywood. Our focus was on displays, high dynamic range, color management and virtual reality for the most part, which means we did not have the bandwidth to cover video over IP, advanced audio, compression, file formats and workflows … Read more
The Difference between Science and a Good Story
During the last few days several news outlets have reported on a new wonder glass developed by Japanese Scientists that is “nearly unbreakable”, “almost as strong as steel” and “will be ready for commercialization” within five years. As a long time glass guy, I surely wanted to know what this is all about. Spoiler alert … Read more
HDR and Compression
With many “flavors” of HDR still being considered, what will that mean for the distribution part of the equation? That was one of the topics considered by several speakers in the “Compression” sessions at the SMPTE Fall conference. VC-3 is one of the codecs being considered for the carriage of HDR content. According to presenter … Read more
High Frame Rate not Getting as Much Attention as HDR
There was not much content or discussion of high frame rate at the SMPTE fall conference this year, but there was a lot of paper on HDR and related issues. However, a talk by Jim DeFlippis of TMS Consulting and Baylor University did discuss High Frame Rate (HFR). The talk started by noting the challenges … Read more
Netflix More Open on 4K and HDR Plans
We had a chance to talk to Netflix at the SMPTE conference about a range of topics. We found them quite open to discussing details. For example, the company is now requesting that all new content be delivered in a 4K-UHD format as they see this as a way to future proof their content. This … Read more
SMPTE Trade Show Floor Updates
Our meetings in the SMPTE Exhibition area focused on display technology. At 3M, we saw numerous demonstrations of quantum dot displays integrated into products. 3M manufactures the QDEF film that contains quantum dots from Nanosys. For example, 3M showed three Asus laptops side-by-side. One used a conventional white LED in the backlight and achieved 50% … Read more
LCD Overdriving Circuits Contribute to Visual Artifacts
Andy Rosen from Bitlogic and Dan Brunner from Microsoft gave a compelling demonstration in the Display session at the SMPTE conference where they showed some interesting artifacts that they say are attributable to the overdriving techniques used in nearly all LCD displays to improve the speed of response. The effect has been long suspected, but … Read more
The BBC Explains Scene and Display Referred Systems and Impact on HLG
The terms “scene referred” and “display referred” have come up a lot lately in discussions about HDR workflows and the transforms needed to capture and display this wider dynamic range content. A paper by Tim Borer and Andrew Cotton from the BBC Research & Development team at the SMPTE fall conference shed more light on … Read more
The BBC Explains Hybrid Log Gamma for HDR
A paper by Tim Borer and Andrew Cotton from the BBC Research & Development team at the SMPTE fall conference shed more light on what Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) is and why it may be better suited to realtime or live broadcast than alternative transforms like the Perceptual Quantizer (PQ) curve. (BBC Approach to HDR … Read more
We Need a New Vocabulary for Image Quality
Josef Marc of Archimedia Technology gave a presentation that resonates well with me – and perhaps with the audience. He espoused that the way we talk about image quality and control its attributes are not very intuitive for the consumer and is inconsistent. Plus, he asked if consumers want more control over the image or … Read more
