Come June, a disruption in television broadcasting is waiting to be unleashed in the FIFA World cup in Brazil?the birth of ultra high definition television (UHDTV). The pilot broadcasting test for UHD version 1 (UHD-1) that provides 3840 pixels x 2160 line resolution (aka 4K x 2K), should give a gasp of breath while watching the
famous long shots of Christiano Ronaldo of Brazil or Iker Casillas of Spain diving far left saving a penalty shot.
Though standardisation is still in progress, UHDTV is expected to give viewers a phenomenal immersive viewing experience at home. The resolution of UHD-1 is four time higher than what we see in high definition (HD) TV at 1920 x1080. UHD-2 that is scheduled to be tested in Rio Olympics in 2016 transmits about 33 mega pixels per frame, thus amounting to 15 times better resolution than HD. Apart from better resolution, the frame rate is 100-150 frames/second (fps) that is 5 times more than HD, thus providing extreme nuances to camera movements of high-speed events.
Colour depth for UHD is 10-12 bits as compared to HD which is 8 bits, thus providing intense colours of the event being broadcast. Apart from visual experience, UHD promises to provide better audio quality at 22.2 channels (while that in HD is only 5.1). The combination of all of the above in UHD provides an intense immersive experience to viewers thus more than replicating theatre viewing right at home.
However, the adoption of UHD worldwide depends on cooperation, agreements and adaptation of components and systems along the broadcast value chain: content production>service aggregation>delivery>reception. It is not just the television at the end-user which needs upgrade; but the entire chain right from content production and cameras required to capture such an enhanced images/video needs to be upgraded. For aggregation of multiple broadcast feeds, necessary hardware and software up gradation is required and for the delivery, the channel needs to be upgraded to handle the higher bitrates. Also, for reception, equipment such as set-top-boxes (STB) need to be enhanced to cater to such a format. What we have seen till now in the market are the UHDTV enabled televisions only, and it is expected that first STB will be available by late 2014.
Large scale adoption of UHD requires all stakeholders in the game to come to common consensus regarding standardisation for mass production of equipment including televisions and cameras. For recollection, there have been the following wars in standardisation of video production and distribution: Sony versus Betamax case in the 70s; Blu-ray versus HD-DVD; Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) versus Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and so on. The final proof in the pudding is when there is alignment of standards across all stakeholders worldwide for mass production of the equipment that will reduce the average cost of products for wider adoption. With Japan and China joining the race for UHD, can we expect consensus or disharmony? Only time will tell.
Apart from the above, we also desperately need huge capacity transmission channels to deliver the content from broadcasting stations to home. While UHD-1 in compressed mode requires more than 150 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth, UHD-2 requires more than 500 Mbps! As per the recently released Akamai?s State of the Internet report, while India?s peak Internet speed crawls at 10.9 Mbps, those in parts of the US, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are no better at about 50 Mbps to carry UHD. It is only projects such as Google Fibre To Home (FTH) piloted at Kansas City in the US providing Gigabit speeds will be able to carry UHD channels.
While FTH is still far off in the radar of most of the emerging countries including India, a possible hope is the use of high frequency Ka-band satellite transmission for direct-to-home that is capable of carrying a few UHD channels. However, India has not yet launched a single satellite transponder with Ka band satellite and has not released the requisite 26.5-40 GHz band for DTH services. It is imperative that department of telecommunications along with ministry of information & broadcasting coordinate the release of Ka band for providing the promised ?broadband on demand?. This will pave way for us in India to get a semblance of UHD!
Shailendra Kumar & V Sridhar
The writers are at Sasken Communication Technologies
