4K Summit: industry needs to reach out to consumers to seal Ultra HD success


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Editor

| 06 November 2015





For 4KTV it's a case of lights, camera but no real consumer action yet until the industry gets closer and communicates better with its target market, the 4K Summit has heard.


The conference brought together representatives from consumer electronics, delivery, distribution and content creation. Indeed the show provided an opportunity for the host country's national broadcaster RTVE to show — in collaboration with Cellnex Telecom, Hispasat, Dolby Laboratories and SAPEC — two worldwide Ultra HD premieres.

The demos comprised the first worldwide showing of Ultra HD content with high dynamic range (HDR), wider colour gamut (WCG) and Dolby AC-4 transmitted over DVB-T2. To facilitate, this Cellnex Telecom launched a DVB-T2 service from its broadcast centre in Valencia using a 500-watt transmitter and providing coverage to the city of Seville, modulated at a bit rate of up to 34 Mbps. Secondly, RTVE showed what it called the First worldwide simultaneous UHD content distribution using DVB-T2, DVB-S2 and the HbbTV interactivity and connected TV standard.

But despite offering great assurance that the industry could respond to the future demand for 4KTV, the conference's first day debated at some length as to whether this demand was actually there and what could be done to stimulate it. Comparisons with HDTV and its evolution were made.

"[At this stage of development] everyone knew about HDTV, but it's not the same with 4KTV now," said TVE's Samuel Martin Mateos. "We need to create as much 4K content as quickly as possible so that an archive exists when demand comes. We need to communicate the value of 4KTV."

Whilst advances have been made, Luis Sahun of SES pointed to a bigger problem that the industry could face by this lack of communication. "It is not certain yet that people have a clear understanding of the [true] meaning of 4K and Ultra HD," he warned.

Carlos Rosado of the Andalucía Film Commission added to this, alluding to what people might want to watch: "It is very important to understand the role of the users and communication, but Ultra HD is condemned to failure if the content is not good enough and users have to be made aware that such content [is available]."