Euromedia March | Page 25

roundtable_round 24/04/2014 12:16 Page 2 Now some of these companies, particularly when they focus on one business area, are getting that down to 18 months.” “There are some challenges to that with HEVC, it’s a new and immature standard. Our focus is on taking the cost out and reducing the resource in the device that has together on introductory services – as they are – that can have an important effect,” comments Orton-Jay. “A big announcement from an important broadcaster will help,” claims Porthouse. “If you remember, Sky announced 3D without actually saying when it would be available to be devoted; reducing the bandwidth and the power. There is a risk for SoC vendors in the short term of fixing in ‘strains’ of HEVC that won’t cover all content in the future. In the short term that means software solutions are preferred but in the medium and longer term high end services are going to need security and I don’t think they will use software HEVC for secured services.” “Yes,” agrees Orton-Jay. “The immaturity of the standard has already caused a few pitfalls for some manufacturers, in particular the variance in bitstream.” “The approach at Entropic is that HEVC but that drove the whole industry forward. Interestingly, the studios we talk to are not happy with just 4K – some content can actually look worse than in 1080p depending on context. They want things like higher colour gamma and improved dynamic range, and these are still real challenges in terms of bandwidth and power with the current infrastructure.” That throws up an important question, what is the minimum bit rate that should be built into the standard; 8, 10, 12? “We are going down the 10 bit route,” declares McKenna. “We feel it gives the best colour definitions, the best compatibility with HDMI2, but the chips and SoCs will be compatible with 8 and 12 bit as well.” “It’s a very interesting area of contention,” comments Orton-Jay, “particularly between the display makers, who would probably be happy just to get the 4K 8bit to market, but Hollywood and major operators have other ideas. We have to sit in the middle and negotiate some of these situations. We think 10 bit probably represents the right compromise. Everyone has to realise that 4K on its own is not the jump people are looking for.” “I think 8 and 10 bit will have to coexist. For TV it will be 10 bit but for mobiles and tablets there will be major power and bandwidth challenges; certainly very little content – games for instance – will be made in 4K, it will be up scaled,” says Porthouse. What about up scaling content to HEVC, can this fill the 4K content gap? “We’re very interested in this,” declares McKen