roundtable_round 24/04/2014 12:16 Page 1
The Sochi Winter Olympics and upcoming FIFA
World Cup both feature plenty of 4K UHD
capture – and even a little 8K – and all major
pay-TV broadcasters and OTT providers have
promised at least experimental transmissions. So
is 2014 the year of 4K for the consumer? Or does
the technology, the display market and content
still have long way to go? Advanced Television
gathered three 4K experts from ARM, Entropic
and Rovi in London to discuss the near and
medium realities for 4K
irst, looking beyond capture to
workflow and transmission,
what is the state of play with
HEVC – the enabling technology of
4K?
“I suppose the key development right now
is the decisions being made by operators as
to whether the encoding is going to be done
at 8, 10 or 12 bit,” says Noel McKenna, VP
Watch the whole discussion at www.advanced-television.com
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“The whole MPEG LA patent pool
needs sorting.”
Chris Porthouse, ARM
sales for Entropic, “as we are mainly
concerned with decode this is crucial for us.
Operators need to be careful they have
backward compatibility and compatibility of
their content for future use. The decisions
they make now in their workflow have a
heavy bearing on where their content can be
used in future.”
“From our perspective the encoding side
is developing very well,” says Sam Orton-Jay,
director product management, Rovi,
“perhaps well ahead of schedule compared to
predictions only a year ago. But in decoding
certainly there is a lot [ܙH