MIPTV 2013 – Cannes. With Sony screens across the Palais and two conference sessions, there was no escaping 4K UltraHD.
SES jumped at the opportunity to announce the launch of its SES Ultra HD Experience initiative, which invites content providers and broadcasters to work with SES to support the development of the Ultra HD value chain.
“You’re not alone. We are here today to say to you: let’s work together,” said Norbert Hoelzle, SVP, commercial Europe, SES, during Wedensday’s 4K session. “Let’s be the catalyst for industry and get the Ultra HD train rolling. The same way we HD started ten years ago, in an industry-wide effort, let’s start Ultra HD today.”
Hoelzle told the audience to learn from the experiences with HD, “Remember: the chicken-and-egg problem at the start of HD. It was a vicious cycle: content, hardware, aggregation – none of the partners got started because the other did not start. The same way we created a virtuous cycle for HD at the time, let’s create a virtuous cycle for Ultra HD now.”
During IBC 2012 SES transmitted an UltraHD show case on Astra at 23.5 degrees east in co-operation with Sony, still using MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encoding at 50 Mbit/s bandwidth.
“We want now to launch the SES Ultra HD experience channel using the new HEVC encoding at 20 – 25 Mbit/s,” Hoezle told producers and broadcasters, “We want to propose you the usage of this channel to test the complete Ultra HD value chain. Not only technically – bringing your content to this stage will also help you to position you in the future Ultra HD field and make sure that your brand and content gets promoted at the point of sales in Europe.
“As satellite is the most suitable infrastructure to deliver high resolution pictures to large audiences, SES is well-positioned to support content providers and broadcasters in testing their Ultra HD footage and distributing their content before Ultra HD becomes a commercial reality in the next few years.”
An interesting side-note – how do we call the new standard? Sony seems to insist on 4K, while SES decided to use UltraHD, as a more consumer friendly name than the technical sounding 4K. For the moment, Broadband TV News will call it 4K UltraHD in order to avoid any misunderstanding.
