Samsung's HDR10+ ecosystem gains momentum
4K/UltraHD Michelle Clancy 27-12-2018
Samsung has announced that its HDR10+ ecosystem has expanded to 45 industry partners, while construction has started on a new certification center in China.

HDR10+ is Samsung’s next-generation standard technology for picture processing, which optimises brightness levels and contrast for each scene, making bright areas brighter and dark areas darker to deliver a lifelike viewing experience. The new partnerships are with companies in a variety of segments, from online streaming and content services to the semiconductor industry.

Last June, Samsung Electronics launched the HDR10+ certification and logo program in partnership with 20th Century Fox and Panasonic. After several months of development, this year, several commercial launches are expected.

Rakuten TV, a European online streaming service, will begin offering HDR10+ content in the first half of next year. One of the largest among CIS and Eastern Europe OTT/VOD services, MEGOGO is currently finishing its HDR10+ licensing process, making its adoption of HDR10+ official, and planning to release HDR10+ contents on its platform, viewable on all Samsung smart-TV devices. ARSPRO, based in Moscow, is another production studio that has implemented HDR10+ technology, including the use of dynamic metadata. It has successfully carried out the remastering of the first several series of programming in HDR10+. On December 3 of this year, the largest Russian OTT/VOD service ivi also presented five European series in HDR10+ to Samsung smart-TV users for the first time in Russia and the CIS region.

“We continually work on improving the video quality for our users. And we are proud to be the first Russian OTT/VOD service to maximise the opportunities available through Samsung QLED TVs and give our subscribers to view the contents in this new improved quality format. We plan to expand our HDR10+ collection because our focus is on providing the highest quality content to the viewers, using all the features of Samsung TVs,” said Irina Grandel, business development director at ivi.

There have been a few early adopters as well. In 2017, Samsung also launched its premium video streaming service with Amazon, making Prime Video the first streaming service to deliver all 4K videos in HDR10+. In 2018, Amazon integrated HDR10+ support into the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, which launched in October. Another HDR10+ partner Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has created over seventy HDR10+ compatible titles so far and plans to have over 100 titles available for digital distribution in HDR10+ by early next year.

Samsung is also building partnerships with major smartphone chip manufacturers. Qualcomm recently announced that HDR10+ will be supported on its new chipset, Snapdragon 855. Arm will also join the HDR10+ network.

In addition, Samsung plans to build a new HDR10+ center in China with TIRT, a national testing and inspection center for the Chinese consumer electronics, in December. The center is designed to help Chinese TV manufacturers, including Hisense, TCL and Konka to access the certification procedure and in turn accelerate the expansion of the HDR10+ ecosystem. The center in China follows the opening of certification centers built in Korea, Japan and the US earlier this year.

“With HDR emerging as one of the most important technologies for ultra-high picture quality, Samsung’s HDR10+ format is gaining recognition,” said Hyogun Lee, EVP of the visual display business at Samsung Electronics. “HDR10+ has already been well-received by major companies across a variety of industries. Samsung will continue to build on this, solidifying our HDR standard technology leadership and maintaining our presence in the global TV market.”