What They Say
Advanced Television reported on the virtual 4K Summit and said that Richard Moreton, from Samsung Electronics’ R&D UK Business Development & Industrial Affairs unit confirmed Samsung’s belief in the future of 8K.
He explained that Samsung had created its agnostic ‘ScaleNet’ (in development stage and now looking for commercialisation) which is claimed to deliver a 50% saving in bandwidth. It works by downscaling smartly and then once delivered to a device upscales back to its original. It is thus capable to delivering 8K video on a 4K pipe or even 4K video on a 2K system.
Moreton praised the 8K work coming out from France’s The Explorers and explained that Samsung 4K TVs can easily handle the decoding down from 8K material to 4K. “But on an 8K set the content from The Explorers is truly amazing.”
He also reminded delegates that there’s a growing amount of 8K content on YouTube which uses AV1 codecs.
Moreton stressed that there had also been valuable live streamed material in 8K over the past year, such as BT working with Samsung on the Arsenal vs Olympiakos 8K football match back in February which used Sony’s UHC-8300 8K camera and ending with a 70 Mb/s compressed HEVC signal.
Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE had transmitted an 8K DVB-T2 terrestrial signal in October, which was a huge success. “It was only a pilot but the end result was fantastic,” said Morton
What We Think
The ScaleNet process, although described as a codec, looks to me like the kind of pre-processing that optimises content to suit the codecs, as there is no metadata or ‘difference stream’ to provide the additional data in the 8K stream. The process was announced around a year ago and uses Deep Learning-based AI to process the content. AI is then used to upscale at the finished device. (BR)
