New TV broadcasting standard will unlock Ultra HD TV broadcasts from BBC and Sky.
Source: www.techradar.com
Although this news specifically pertains to UK and European broadcasters, the key element in the story is the standardization of the HEVC compression codec for over-the-air transmission, the same codec currently being used by Netflix for their 4K Ultra HD internet streams.
HEVC (H.265) is a next-step up from MPEG-4/H.264 compression, but comes with a (licensing) cost: encoders and decoders will have a royalty fee imposed on them. Content producers don’t have to worry about those fees, but box and software producers/vendors do, which most certainly will be incorporated into costs to the consumer.
There is an open-source alternative, VP9, from Google. Open-source/free sounds good, but reports are that the quality of the compression results aren’t as good as HEVC (see a good report on these codecs along with comparisions at http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-Codecs-That-Make-UHD-Video-Possible-HEVC-Vs.-VP9-96926.aspx).
There are other codecs appearing, but it looks like we’re in for another VHS vs. Betamax battle over standards. Betamax famously lost in the consumer market, finding its home in studios long after home units disappeared. But the dividing line isn’t so clear this time, particularly with Internet streaming of both commercial content and billions of hours of Google-owned YouTube content, some of which is already being offered in 4K.
So keep downloading Flash or Quicktime or something else to play your AVI files, and start making 4K content.
Europe, show us the way to get that beautiful UHD video onto our big screens.
